Hard Sleeper ~ “Rain”/A Leaf Spiral
This first longplayer
for Sub Rosa by Dublin-based Hard Sleeper, aka Peter Maybury, sounds at times
more like a group effort than the product of a lone individual. Accompanied
by electronic snuffles and hollow tubular sounds, a piano multiplies, each
iteration of the instrument playing small repetitive figures in its own sonic
space. The music ebbs and flows as the pianos mark out melancholy rhythms
until unexpectedly stopping short. In their place a market garden’s
worth of electronic flora blossoms, in whose synthetic borders can be heard
brief echoes of Herbie Hancock’s 1973 masterpiece Rain Dance. Later
passages bleed successively into each other, percussive stabs piercing blocks
of electronic noise, lambent bass hanging pendulously inside the music’s
structure. Hard Sleeper’s titular references to nature underline a sense
that this soundworld, although predominantly electronic, maintains a relationship
with the living world. The music appears to be both constructed and performed
without, however, making clear its precise methodology (the hard-edged vector
design of the cd cover gives nothing away). The mystery of the interaction
keeps this listener fascinated throughout. Combined with a rapt attention
to the quality and placement of each sound, Hard Sleeper’s music is
refreshingly unfamiliar, as though deliberately, but unselfconsciously resisting
the rut of the known. The music’s development is leisurely and unpredictable,
and the vast majority of the piece’s 23 minute duration can be experienced
as a confident journey in an unfamiliar territory. Only at its conclusion
is “Rain”’s strangeness marred somewhat by a resolution
that is achieved a little too easily. The rest of the disc consists of A Leaf
Spiral, a four part composition which proves as rich and spacious as its predecessor.
In the first section electronic cicadas shadow the patter of radioactive rain,
while in a later part, rhythmic elements are heard like hesitant clockwork
felt on the skin. Here is sound, tactile and dynamic enough to make one’s
ears smile. It’s difficult not to feel disappointment when the music
ends.
Colin Buttimer
January 2005