| I’ll admit it. From time to time I suffer from music burnout. If you have this same affliction I am here to tell you that step one of recovery is acknowledging you have a problem, and step two is to buy Behind Every Mask. From the same label that releases music from Daedelus, Aesop Rock, cLOUDDEAD, Her Space Holiday and Busdriver comes the new (and first solo) instrumental release from the Lawrence experimental texture/beat (recently dubbed “American wall of sound”) producer Sleeper. On this album he proves himself to be an alchemist of the highest order in his duel obsession of craft and tool. Many electronic musicians compose almost exclusively with the help of computer applications and Red Bull. Conversely, the beginning stages of composition for Sleeper often find him in his lab hunched over a work bench, soldering iron sending smoke trails to the ceiling, whilst his dense, beat-heavy creations take shape in his mind. This is because Sleeper routinely “bends” and modifies everything from Speak & Spells and digital keyboards from the 1980s, to guitar effect pedals and dot matrix printers in order to build the unmistakably unique layers of lo-fi claustrophobic landscapes his songs live in. To produce a sound as simultaneously unconventional and contagious as what you hear on Behind Every Mask it is apparently important to also use unorthodox means. With one foot in the world of samples and Hip Hop beats and the other in the world of avant-garde electronic tinkering and aural abstraction, Sleeper strayed from the music herd long ago. It is now everyone else’s challenge to go find him. - Larryville |
