Sleep Party People - Sleep Party People

Album - new. Release date: 19/02/21. Pale Gold Vinyl

Genre: Ambient

Sitting in his bedroom in Copenhagen one evening in 2008, arched over a shivering piano in the twilit cool, Brian Batz found himself measuring out sounds in cascading waves. The aching and otherworldly Third Drawer Down the product of Batz’s 2 a.m. chording reflects an ecstatic phonometric approach for his first album under the moniker Sleep Party People. Full of arcane arrangements, broken and secondhand instruments, and manipulated vocals, the ST record has redoubled in mystic strength on the verge of its 10-year anniversary reissue. Batz began working on SPP as an alternative outlet from the band he’d been playing with, the opportunity to opt for the obscure decisions and creative idiosyncrasies on his own. Without proper recording equipment or fancy gear, that meant summoning together the misfit musical tools in his apartment including a busted piano, an outdated Roland TR-505 drum machine, a keyboard, a handful of assorted guitar pedals, and an acoustic guitar that the kindergarten where he worked was going to throw away.

“I sat in my apartment for a year and a half turning everything upside down and just trying to push my own limits,” Batz recounts. The completed record swims through a dizzying sea of haunting imagery and clever musical turns: the fluffy winter afternoon of “Our Falling Snow”, the pulsating MicroKorg pop of “10 Feet Up”. The inspiration from the tracks ranges from the surreal to the ultra-real; “The Dwarf and the Horse” utilizes silverware and water glasses for a percussion base inspired by a Lynchian dream of the titular characters, while “Notes to You” was inspired by a letter Batz wrote to his father and eventually tore up rather than send. And as the years passed, more and more homemade bunny masks have made their way into the crowd, fans around the world eager to join the journey, singing along even if Batz’s lyrics are more impressionistic than crystalline sentences. “People write out my lyrics all the time and they’re always wrong,” he says. “But even still, they capture the feeling.” Therein lies the sublime magic of Sleep Party People, a record that conveys equal depth and power to countless listeners despite no two seeing it exactly the same way.