Saint of the underpass (Sleeper II)

Sleeper II follows the same basic idea as the rest of the Sleeper series: record one live take, finish it that day, and leave it as it is. But compared to Sleeper I, this one is much more centered around feedback and control. Even so, I do not really hear it as a noise piece. There is still a clear somber harmonic core underneath it, and that matters more to me than the raw fact that the sound is unstable.

The sound is built from multiple complex feedback chains that I control all at once. That is what gives the track its large, spatial, organic, and texture-rich quality. During the recording I was controlling filter frequencies live over MIDI, and also controlling how much feedback returned at different points in the chains. Overdrive and deliberately harsh sounds are not really part of the track.

That is also where the melancholy comes from for me: the harmonies underneath those shifting feedback structures, together with the heavy weight of the sound itself. The piece is not really aggressive so much as slow and lumbering. It moves heavily, and that heaviness is a large part of what makes it work.

Because of that, the piece feels more tense and more narrowly focused than Sleeper I. It does not really open outward in the same way. It stays closer to one unstable center and keeps pressing against it from different angles, but without losing the harmonic thread that holds it together.

Like the rest of the Sleeper series, it matters to me that this remained a live take and was not rebuilt afterwards. The whole point is that the form of the piece comes from what happened in that one performance, rather than from later correction.