Mush Records used to rate, but there was an absence of sunstance for a while, or was there? Maybe I just wasn’t paying attention, maybe I just overlooked the labels releases, maybe a busy life with little time didn’t allow me to assign the energy to care. What we have here is a new album from Sleeper, Behind The Mask, on Mush. I begin to understand Sleeper as a producer, he is also an established and respected tattoo and visual artist, managing to portray this in his sound work, defined outlines, yet with shade and texture between.
Behind Every Mask opens with a brooding darkness, and it doesn’t let much light shine through for the rest of the album, it starts out how it aims to continue. There is a dense and claustrophobic tone to this record, both in mood and musically, meshing together an intriguing mix of electronic and hip hop production, sounds found and sounds squeezed through numerous analogue machines, a post industrial ambience and an underlying post metal sludge that seems to tie everything together.
There seems to be a essence of David Lynch movie’s here, a bizarre unexplainable context, a confusion of what is actually going on, which works really well, creating a bubbling sense of doom and menace, a claustrophobia secured by tighly honed drum breaks and other worldly machines. The darkness is good sometimes. - Cyclic Defrost |
