The Brvtalist is proud to present a new mix by Los Angeles-based experimental electronic artist Sleep Clinic. One of the many great projects of Jeff Swearengin, Sleep Clinic is defined by dark, cerebral electronics that plunges the listener into the depths of time and space. Active since 2005, Sleep Clinic has released material on Decisive Sound, Squarewav and Chondritic Sound.
Available next week on the upstart, Ann Arbor-based label Atrium, Sleep Clinic will release "Night City", an album that was recorded in two parts separated by several years. Each half has a distinct feel and the record progresses from a stage of awakening to full consciousness. The electronics maintain a quiet, pensive feeling while still resonating very loudly. We love the almost soundtrack-like compositions that create a biting, sonic narrative. From the artist:
The performances within Night City were originally recorded in March of 2010. Three of the original tracks and their titles were taken off and Anesthesia 3 , Night City 2 and Night City 3 were all recorded in July of 2015 using the same rig used in 2010 with very minor fine tuning.
The title does reach to William Gibson's Neuromancer to some degree and drawing a parallel into the sprawl that is Los Angeles and the effects that it can have on one's choices and destination after being in it for long periods paticularly with an unchecked trajectory, and the parallel of being in hallucinatory states as being jacked in to the grid of cyberspace, where physics, properties, and laws have different parameters. Like a technicolored and sterilized version of William Burroughs' Interzone...Night City was alive, and breathing, and conscious for me.
I found myself particularly dissociated and compartmentalized by my relationships and myself during the period of time I started these recordings. I started to take that internal landscape and externalize it through heavy use of dissociative drugs. I would find myself mapping out the city late at night in a slipstream of hallucinatory and surreal vantages and perspectives shifting, like in a dream when you are in a place or see a person that looks familiar but its energy is totally different and you know it isn't the same place or person.
I no longer knew the days, and the night time I was communicating within was this seemingly isolated place with very few participants. I had finally succeeded without trying, to live fully ejected, in a dream like fugue state that constantly swirled its subtly or aggression on a sliding scale basis.
These songs are soundtrack based vignettes into these moments where I traversed these inner-spaces I was allowing myself to belong to; functioning also like blind contour drawings of who and where I was during the origins of these recordings. They also at the same time describe these emptied out moments of relief and peace from my reality and nonreality...working on this and what it did for me was the actual effect I was hoping for all along. The short bursts of clarity and stability that would come in waves of a week or two at a time would yield these recording experiments. Consciously, these were experiments that also explored the nature of interface and the results that are produced by the abilities of that interface and its limitations as well.
This release does also in a way act as a precursor to my follow up to 'A Chance, A Curse' on Chondritic Sound entitled, Stray Light [more to do with the actual technical discovery and cleaning of light in an optical system or in a network that is not intended to be there than it is with the location in Neuromancer]..Stray Light is not anywhere as pretty and clean as Night City but marks a continued shift in sound and styles. -Jeff Swearengin, Los Angeles 2015
New Brvtalism No. 030 is an extended exploration of many of the themes found on "Night City". You will find yourself drifting through endless urban sprawl and lush Metropolitan soundscapes. We would like to thank Sleep Clinic for this truly epic contribution to our series. "Night City" is out on October 2, 2015 and below please find an album preview streaming for a very limited time. For more information, please visit Facebook, Soundcloud and Bandcamp.
-JRS
