At The Edges of Sleep

There's a bittersweet beauty to the passing of time – the changes it brings are just as often heartbreaking as they are heartwarming. The inevitable tension that arises from that sway is Gretchen Peters' most trusted muse. “The years go by like days. Sometimes the days go by like years. And I don't know which one I hate the most,” she sings in “Arguing with Ghosts,” the hauntingly wistful opening cut on her new album, Dancing with the Beast.

“In this post-industrial, post-enlightenment religion of ourselves, we have manifested a serpent of consumerism which now coils back upon us. It seduces us with our own bait as we betray the better instincts of our nature and the future of our own world. We throw ourselves out of our own garden. We poison ourselves to the edges of an endless sleep.

Deep Nature Mysticism by Tomas Weiss/Mathias Grassow and guests.
North Passage (2008). "Norvegia" opens the disc, a low drone bed with occasional sounds overtop, a very beautiful atmospheric piece that brings to mind the Nostromo disc by Sleep Research Facility. Very dark and somewhat ominous, "Norvegia" is inspired in its approach at conjuring a dark atmosphere. The transition into "Arkona" is nearly imperceptible, but as time passes it becomes clear that new elemements have been added to the sound. A haunting call, a deeper drone, we've clearly entered new territory but it all feels to be part of the same journey, a logical step in our travels…

Long Thoughts is ambient music master Steve Roach’s first long-form electronic release on Projekt since 2012. In an era where a constant deluge of overstimulation from all directions challenges and fractalizes our attention span into smaller and smaller packets, 73-minute sanctuary provides solace: a soul-renewing immersion in the deeper end of the self-reflection pool.