Sleep - The Cult of the Big Sleep

Sleep, essential for dreaming, has always been understood by humankind as a place of otherness, of suspended time and space, of possibility and the transcending of reality. Through the "great sleep", classical heroes like Epimenides partook of the wisdom of the immortals and gained magical and divinatory powers.

Sleep fit, in their own way, into this ancient and endless shamanic tradition that seeks in lethargic possession the medium for transcendence and spirituality, exploring through drone, the simplicity of the mantra and the hypnotic power of stoner guitar, the most hidden and darkest paths of the soul.

Sleep were formed in 1990 in San Jose, California, as a hard-rock group originally made up of Al Cisneros (bass and vocals), Matt Pike (guitar), Justin Marlen (guitar) and Chris Hakius (drums). With this lineup, the band managed to record in 1991, with Tutelo, a small San Francisco indie label, Volume One, an album that immediately made clear Cisneros and co.'s lysergic influences and passion for fuzz. Suffering, distorted litanies like "Stillborn" and "Nebuchadnezzar's Dream" stand out as dark gems of rare depth and morbidity, proving that Sleep, even without a flawless technique, had plenty of good ideas and passion to spare.

After a handful of shows in small venues around the San Francisco area, guitarist Marlen, in the grip of a mystical crisis probably linked to drug abuse, left the band to retreat into monastic life (only after several years of total seclusion in a monastery would Justin return to music with Sabians), reducing Sleep to a power trio.

Following the release of the EP Volume 2 on Off The Disk, the band got in touch with Earache, with whom they recorded Sleep's Holy Mountain in 1993, an album even more deeply influenced than its predecessor by the crepuscular, heavy sound of bands like Black Sabbath, Blue Cheer and Saint Vitus, and by the artificial paradises of THC. Through this dark, obsessive yet also mystical and explosive album (not lacking in more purely experimental, free-form moments like "Evil Gypsy" or "Inside The Sun"), almost unknowingly, Sleep rose to become key players, alongside Monster Magnet, Fu Manchu and Kyuss, in the newborn "stoner" scene - that particular seventies-oriented sound filtered through metal, psychedelia and blues, all of it thickened and slowed down, which developed with fervor and creativity throughout the '90s and reached commercial success in the 2000s with bands like Queens of the Stone Age. Proof of Sleep's immense love for Black Sabbath came with their cover of "Snowblind", featured on a tribute album Earache dedicated to the four lords of the black sabbath. Legend has it that Ozzy himself declared his enthusiasm for the young band's cover, stating that Sleep, better than anyone else on the tribute album, seemed to recapture the magical, ancestral atmosphere of Sabbath.

Almost inexplicably, major label London/Polygram - perhaps hoping to get their hands on a new, slightly more naive Kyuss to launch on the rock market - signed Sleep, forking out several thousand dollars to secure their services and fund the recording (money that, as Matt Pike recalls, soon went up, quite literally, "in smoke").

Energized by the new deal, the band retreated into the studio for two years under the supervision of Billy Anderson (already producer for Melvins and Brutal Truth) and finally, in 1995, delivered to London that legendary work called Jerusalem: a scalding flow of sick and evocative acid-doom, an anguished, endless fifty-two-minute stream of saturated sounds, biting, repetitive riffs and possessed feedback, enclosed in a single six-movement suite, suspended in pure slowness, as if asleep or so "stoned" as to abandon any connection to the time of the world.

On the record, Matt Pike batters and torments his guitar, grinding out dark, powerful riffs, Al Cisneros marks the tempo with his wicked, hypnotic vocals, howling words steeped in religious syncretism and mysteriosophical mystical imagery, carving deep, obsessive basslines through the din, while Chris Hakius leads the whole caravan through the desert with rhythms that are almost illuminating in their brutal, savage simplicity.

The result is a black, swamp-like, motionless sea, the breath of a biblical monster advancing slowly and destructively from the heart of oblivion toward the sliver of light hidden in the folds of sound.

London - as was to be expected - flatly rejected the recordings, tore up Sleep's contract and shelved the album, refusing to release it.

From this point on, Sleep's life lasted only as long as a cameo in the soundtrack of the cult movie "Gummo", alongside Burzum and Destroy All Monsters (a soundtrack well worth owning!), and the futile attempts to get clearance from London to somehow release Jerusalem. The disappointment for the San Diego band was intense: Jerusalem represented two whole years of work and the poetic and spiritual peak of their output, their zenith, or rather their own REM phase, and now, without a contract and with London sitting on the record, Sleep had no choice but to break up.

It wasn't until 1998 that Music Cartel finally managed to release Jerusalem, which had by then become a true legend among stoner fans and lovers of extreme rock alike — both for its troubled recording history, and for its deranged psychedelic doom content loaded with spiritual fascinations, and also for its enviable reputation as the absolute, definitive anthem to the heavy consumption of marijuana for "ascetic" purposes.

A few years later, as proof of the great interest that had grown around Sleep and their legendary third album, TeePee released, under the title Dopesmoker, a version of Jerusalem with the original mix, stretched out even further.

Meanwhile, after a few years of silence, the three members of Sleep returned to music: Matt Pike leads a solid heavy band called High On Fire, while Cisneros and Hakius continue their experimental-spiritual journey as a bass-drums duo under the mantric name Om, in some way carrying forward the work left unfinished by the groundbreaking but ill-fated Sleep.

In 2018, after a long gestation, Sleep's much-awaited comeback was released: The Sciences. The band's trademark sound is still fully intact: pitch-black atmospheres, marked out by down-tuned guitars whose slow, relentless riffs build a powerful, hypnotic wall of sound. The arrangements are cleaner and more polished than on the band's earlier albums, an evident legacy of the groups each member played in during the interim, but this does nothing to dull the music's edge: the tracks, sprawling, gargantuan, visceral, hit hard while painting spatial visions of a metallic trip. Al Cisneros's vocals have held up well over all these years, but the production doesn't make them especially gripping or enveloping. A dirtier, more "muddy" production would probably have brought out his timbre better, but given that his presence is kept fairly restrained anyway — leaving the slow riffs and penetrating bass as the record's main "voice" — the result still comes across as solid, spontaneous, well-written and well-played. A welcome return after so many years.

Contributions by Alessandro Mattedi ("The Sleep").

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google