BAND OF THE WEEK: 夢遊病者 (Sleepwalker)
New album just announced!
Very few bands could get away, in an international context, with being called things like 夢遊病者. It’s just another alphabet, of course, and it’s perfectly normal to the people who use it, and it’s not even a weird word or anything (it means Sleepwalker). But for a trio that is scattered across Osaka, Tver and New York, whose members are more or less unknown or at least hidden behind a few shadows, it’s something that already sends a message of deliberate obfuscation even before you listen to the music. The fact that there really aren’t band pictures to speak of is definitive proof of this, and the complicated, unpredictable, deeply symbolic and constantly shape-shifting music they’ve been doing ever since their inception is completely in tune with those assumed intentions. By the way, if you do want a little peek beyond the veil, a certain podcast has done an episode with one of the band members as guest a while ago, so maybe check it out if you haven’t yet.
Anyway, we are gathered here today to celebrate, yet again, the union of 夢遊病者 and surprising, inspiring, fucking out-there-somewhere music, in the form of their new advance song off their forthcoming album. The song in question is called ‘Silesian Fur Coat’, the album will be called, wait for it, ‘Skopofoboexoskelett‘, and no, I haven’t got the faintest clue what any of these things mean. I just know the video is absolutely hypnotic and that the song sounds nothing at all like 夢遊病者 and yet it manages to be unmistakably 夢遊病者 at the same time. When I was able to blurt out something to the band member that kindly showed me the song before the premiere, what I told him was “it's like you did a split release with Earth and then just played the two sides at once,” so make of that what you will.
Nothing makes sense, and everything is amazing. It’s more atmospheric, it’s profoundly psychedelic, there’s a percussive, almost Middle-Eastern in feel, drive to the whole thing, and everything is so brain-meltingly enveloping that when I finished the first listen, I swear I couldn’t even remember if I had heard vocals or not (which you will realise how weird it is after you hear the song), so lost that I was in this piece. I can only imagine what the rest of the album will bring, and with magnificent pearls of perfection like ‘Noč Na Krayu Sveta’ or ‘5772’ in their catalogue, I won’t go ahead and proclaim that it’ll be their best thing yet, but right now it sure feels like it.
Go ahead and dive in, and let me know what you think. And hey, just so we’re a little less lost, I thought it’d be cool to have a little chat with the band themselves about all of this. Read all of it after the jump. You’re welcome!
“We give very little fucks and way too many at the same time.”
- 夢遊病者
As I said in the bit above, this new song is mind-blowing, as it sounds nothing like the previous things you’ve done, and yet it’s unmistakably 夢遊病者. Let’s start with the “unmistakably 夢遊病者” bit. Why do you think that is, exactly? What defines 夢遊病者, that makes the listener – and yourselves, I suppose? – establish the same connections even if the music is so different each time? Do you do anything specific that allows for that sort of continuity?
夢遊病者: I think ultimately the short answer is that we give very little fucks and way too many at the same time. Someone commented recently that it was “an intuitive force”— so the peripheral is left just there on the outer banks; the core that remains in the centre is mined until we hear nothing else.
You are famously heterogeneous in terms of your geographical origins in the band, how does that reflect in the music, you think? Do you feel you draw from a more wide pool of, well, “influences” sounds so reductive in this instance, let’s call it cultures, even? You know what I mean, anyway. And is that part of the secret as to how unique you sound?
夢遊病者: Similarly, to the previous answer—I think it’s codebreaking. The songs are there waiting to be unlocked, they are basically already written; the clawing, the blowtorch, the delicate mechanical drill James Caan-style get attuned to the sounds of Edgar Froese in the frame. It doesn’t matter if the safe is at the akrotiri in Santorini, or in a smoky bar in Havana, the key exists whether it is a scalpel cutting into celluloid or shadows of steel ripping through light at a Brentwood diner at night.
How was the writing for this new album, did anything different happen, did you use any method or anything that you hadn’t before? And were there any previous talks as to how you wanted it to sound/feel, or is that something more spontaneous that reveals itself as you go?
夢遊病者: The Lada-Intuition Mobile drove us to a claim that this album will be more stripped down, but we probably choked a lot of the air out of that notion. We were lucky to work with some premium human beings, man. The vocalists we really tried to keep as dry as possible; there was an excursion to a work site into a gigantic well of a crater pipe from what I understand; horrorscopes singing in Dutch; Athletics Sport Metal touch; trad Swedish folk instruments; all of these brought our skeletons alive and glued some skin on their bones. The final painting congealed into a whistle from Once Upon a Time in the (East) somehow.
This video feels absolutely connected to the song, would you care to talk a bit more about the visuals employed and how they relate to the song and its concept?
夢遊病者: If there was an easy way to break it down it would be notion of a traveller. The irises survey scenes of humanity or inhumanity, going through portals of caves, the coats of animals staring back in disdain; observing nature [ultimately] engulfing the human force, the gestures of the human hand twitching, futile, in a way. As always, it is more descriptive, any takeaways are left to the viewer.
Is this new song representative of the album in any way? Of course, not asking if all the others sound the same way, but was there a reason why you picked this one over any others?
夢遊病者: ‘Mirrors Turned Inward’ has been said to be chaos. We would have stuck to chronology, but ‘Silesian…’ felt more conducive to a visual counterpart; there is a clear green colour to the track which was one key. As with the songs, the video kind of edited itself and felt most harmonious in its call to live beyond the speakers. Sport Death Metal Man has said the last track was “too pretty”; and the flight of the Eagle is likely too grind. The picture isn’t complete without all four though.
What else can you reveal as of now about the album? And dudes, for fuck’s sake, what the hell is a Skopofoboexoskelett?
夢遊病者: At the turn of the century there was a lot of German and Polish ophthalmologists and psychologists trying to uncover scientific and medical explanations to the notion of The Evil Eye; the name is simply an extrapolation of that notion as an amulet; the self-destructive nature of phobia, the embracing of failure, an uplifting revelling in a certain damnation—for the sake of all fuck! :)
‘Skopofoboexoskelett’ is out on August 4th via Sentient Ruin Laboratories.
Tracklist:
1. Mirrors Turned Inward (8:05)
2. Silesian Fur Coat (5:55)
3. The Eagle Flies (2:43)
4. The Bad Luck That Saved You From Worse Luck (8:05)
You can find 夢遊病者 on Bandcamp.
This band is a nuke blast to my face.