Sleep Research Facility, Deep Frieze (Cold Spring)

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This is the ambient music that ambient music puts on the stereo when it wants to unwind and get reaquainted with its roots.

Toronto´s Sleep Research Facility perversely approach the "comfort of encroaching hypothermia" with this sweeping, textbook example of true soundscaping craftsmanship. The playful title puns of course on the temperatures to be encountered in the Arctic, the region inspiring the five works presented here, but there is also a deeper poetry here. A frieze is of course a mural, an oversized, panoramic view of something - in this case, the top of the world and the deeper, hidden delights of what most dismiss as a monochrome wasteland.

Sleep Research Facility allows each piece to evolve at its own pace. Our location is clearly set at the outset as SRF effortlessly conjures up the sound and feel of icy wastes across which the winds roam unimpeded. He progresses by smearing great swaths of thick greys and off-whites on this canvas as he raises monoliths of unimaginably large exterior space, the kind of space only nature can provide. Although one drone does indeed recall being indoors - imagine the most tremendous hall housing the most monstrous giant turbines you could ever conceive.

It´s inspiring to hear someone with such an ear for nothingness.

http://www.coldspring.co.uk