Sleepdial

Sleepdial’s latest effort, Ext, begins with a collage of coruscating white noise, seemingly created by taking droning tones and distorting them beyond recognition. What emerges from that chaos is an incandescent melody that ends abruptly. It’s as if you’re in a spaceship, emerging from the star-dense core of a new galaxy into the endless dark of open space, with intermittent blips that slowly build in frequency serving as your only source of sonic illumination. All of these songs sound like Cluster attempting to play free jazz; it’s lo-fi ambient music drawn directly from the pre-verbal end of the imagination. With this release, Luke Thinnes, Sleepdial’s driving force, has created the musical equivalent of phosphenes, admirably articulating the essence of the landscape beyond the mountaintop with the seven-eyed goat in Ken Russell’s Altered States.