Hard Sleeper - Rain/A Spiral Leaf
(Sub Rosa)
This new two-song, album-length release from Dubliner Peter Maybury (AKA Hard Sleeper) begins with “Rain,” a 23½ minute piece of ambient electronics, combining subtle, repetitive, forlorn piano beats with liberal doses of electronic “glitch” music peppered throughout. One could argue, as John Cage often did, that any combination of sounds or noises can be classified as “music,” and if you could imagine sparks flying off a subway or trolley car or downed electrical wire morphing into the repetitive “bloop-bloop” of raindrops falling onto a puddle or surface of a lake, you’ll have a good idea of the opening ‘sounds” of the first third of “Rain.”
More found sounds, percussives, radio waves and video arcade bleeps and bloops are looped with the ever-present glitches to form the beat-heavy midsection, which quietly folds into the four-part, 18-minute second track, again relying on ambient, electronic glitches and appealing mainly to those that are hypnotized by the repetitive clicks and pops of a scratchy record (which is, after all, one of the intentions of glitch music—to explore, through recreation, the sound of your old, scratchy vinyl). Talk about coming full circle! This may be a bit deep for those of you who thought the whole attraction and marketing ploy of CDs was to replace that vinyl, not recreate it!
Throughout the four parts, you’ll hear recurring patterns of cooing pigeons, humming refrigerators, buzzing speakers, whispering oxygen tanks, ear-piercing dog whistles and transatlantic radio transmissions. These two challenging compositions will mainly be of interest to fans of experimental electronica, particularly glitch music and the more avant garde musique concrete and a fitting addition to the collections of fans who own Maybury’s two earlier albums (his self-titled 2000 debut on Émigré and this year’s earlier release, Land on Fällt) as well as compilations such as OHM: The Early Gurus of Electronic Music (Ellipsis Arts, 2000) and The Conet Project (Irdial, 1997).
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