Album Review - sleepytimejesse Spacious Anxious
Space music is a genre which, much like the æther from which its name is derived, is hard to get into. It many ways, it is both the original and ultimate hipster music scene. One truly has to be an explorer and seek out artists who craft sounds of this praeternatural music style. So it is with a bit of rocket scientist-at-a-press-conference-giddiness, that I find myself writing about a newly discovered piece of space music for the second time this month. And much like the exciting things which those who gaze constantly skyward find, this album is a bit of an anomaly.
sleepytimejesse (Jesse Martin) is an artist who first came to my attention after listening to an utterly mad and amazing album called Stockwave 001; a set of sounds created from free samples from a stock music website. It is however sleepytimejesse's new, full-length album which has solidified my opinion of him as a music artist.
Spacious Anxious will be a challenging listen for some, but that is the beautiful thing about space music as a subgenre; the thrill of learning about the unknown. The album opens on a track called "Interlude: The Vacuum Of Space" which fits the space music moniker in the classical sense.
Much like real space though, things can get bumpy. Or in this case, rocky. As the possibility of successfully navigating an asteroid field is approximately 3,720 to 1*, please proceed with caution, or full speed ahead, your choice.
The next two pieces on the album continue the interstellar travel theme, but it is with track 5 that the listener finds themselves journeying into a different space altogether; the world of cyberspace.
sleepytimejesse accomplishes with this sub-two minute piece what few artists who dabble in the electronic realm dare to: record a piece of music which sounds exactly like how one might imagine music inside a computer would sound like without quoting anything from Wendy Carlos' legendary TRON soundtrack. This is definitely among the strongest pieces here, but it is the next track which wins as my favourite on the album.
With "A Ticking Clock" sleepytimejesse weaves beautiful astral soundscapes which are pushing his musical instruments of choice far beyond their intended design limits. More on that in a minute, but first, please enjoy the next piece from Spacious Anxious, with emphasis on anxious. A fuller dose of volume might be in order for this one.
My initial thoughts on this song were that it sounded like an alternate soundtrack piece to a horror film like Cabin in the Woods but sleepytimejesse described it more accurately as his trying "to convey feelings of claustrophobia".
After diverting from space music in the strict sense, sleepytimejesse gets back on course with the album's closing trio of pieces, which include forays into 70's and 80's sci-fi tones which remind me ever so slightly of Tom Baker-era Doctor Who (that would be the Fourth Doctor for those keeping track) and a spiritual call back to the climactic scene from Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
I intentionally left a piece of information about this album from the beginning of this review, so as not to color your opinion of it. Spacious Anxious was "created with sample instruments taken from SNES, N64 and GameCube games." The album is also interspersed with samples of vinyl fuzz. Why did I leave this out? Because now I want you to go back and listen to this album again, all the way through with that knowledge. You will find it hard to detect that the music came from game consoles and up to this point you likely thought it was recorded purely using standard synthesizers.
With this new album, sleepytimejesse has crafted a rare example of an evolved form of chiptunes, which is a very good thing for the genre. While he doesn't list space music under the genre tags on the album's bandcamp page, it absolutely fits in with this description, even with the side trips it takes during the middle section. Major props to sleepytimejesse on his... (Red Alert! Pun incoming!)
stellar new album.
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