This album provides restful background music that could be enjoyed while waiting for sleep to take you, with a dark and spooky atmosphere.
Ringing cave sounds emerging with muffled power
Welcome to the dark side of sleep music. They say that sleep music is designed to listen to when you are struggling to fall asleep, generally slow and free from distracting surprises or sudden loud noises, which can cause feelings of panic or dread, sudden motor activity, thrashing, sweating, rapid breathing, increased heart rate. This album provides restful background music that could be enjoyed while waiting for sleep to take you, with a dark and spooky atmosphere.
Once there was something awful and cloaked sitting upon my armchair.
The music starts, choral radio static and ringing cave sounds emerging with muffled power. I feel like I am witnessing the fabled slowed-down time. For fans of gritty textures, eerie ambience and deep dreaming sonics, this is the cheese. I love the ghosts, alien visits, demons or demonic possession, pavor nocturnus, alien abduction experiences, the night hag and shadow people haunting me.
Sleep paralysis is sometimes interpreted as space alien abduction in the United States. Night terrors have been known since ancient times, high rates and long durations of immobility during sleep paralysis have been found in early Egypt, where there are elaborate beliefs involving malevolent spirit-like creatures, the jinn. The night hag is a generic name for a folkloric creature found in cultures around the world, nocturnal attacks have been closely connected to myths and monsters across time and cultures. Now back to listening.
I hear those vibrating low notes with bits of odd reflections and pictures I do not understand, “Counting Poisoned Sheep” (7:16) I heard some groaning sheep melting into one dark pile, they are crying to me “baa baa not dead” and they are still coming closer I think. Up ahead a dark hall of mirrors awaits with the orchestra of darkness, waiting for me to die somewhere in the caves below this place. Now the funeral moves deeper, “Into the Woods (far, far away)” (4:44) where always at night I remember so many lost things. There is suddenly some strange activity, is something growling? I keep bumping into things, sinking into the empty places, I am watching the sky grow further away. I can not say because the action has changed, the movie keeps moving as planned.
Following the whistling phantom drones
Deep inside the same cave and in the same darkness, I find “Sleep’s Flora and Fauna” (3:28). I am witnessing the same funeral, unbearable but compelling, following slow steps down slow slopes, watching the changing terrain, watching each new living organism as we pass, going so slowly, forever almost keeping up with the guiding drones. I wonder which way is up now? “Mirage” (5:21) is where the motion was stopped and now we are lumbering hopefully upwards. I think that could be a bass grandfather clock, do you see his sleeping face in the moonlight? Is that the mirage now? Or are we forgotten? Parasomnias are a category of sleep disorders that involve abnormal movements, behaviors, emotions, perceptions, and dreams that occur while falling asleep, sleeping, between sleep stages, or during arousal from sleep.
Another has risen behind us, following the whistling phantom drones and I fear that now I am lost within the newest mirage. And this never ends, but remember, once we escaped from the harbor, which was so big. Now we are on a boat chugging low and steady, “Rooms that Travel” (7:33) where I hear that same crackling old radio or another, further off I hear an orchestra of giant manatees in slow motion, so big, opening wider and louder. I know that they might roll and accidentally crush me and never know or see where I was, I am helplessly watching in slow motion. Do you hear the bigger sounds getting more complex than they seemed at first? I think I do. Inside we are all so dark and always guessing. I tell you that there is a giant in there singing at the end.
This time we are in a travel station with lots of activity, this is where the danger must be, the air is closer than before, so are we in a tunnel? “Moonlit Teeth” (5:13) falls away, where are the moonbeams? I know there are teeth. Here the giant doors are starting to open, “Abandon” (6:57) then drop away into a kind of gel, the story borders are usually near here, the tones are permanent and they fill the void all the way to the end. I enjoyed the rich atmospheric ride.
Underwater Sleep Orchestra is a project by Bruce Moallem of God Body Disconnect and Pär Boström of Cities Last Broadcast/Kammarheit. Where their debut album was presented as two dreams from the same night, this album is for the insomniacs who stayed behind: the drifters between sleep and wake. Music calling from blurry forests of the mind.
Insomnolence is available on Cryo Chamber. [Bandcamp]
