The Sandman Wears a Mask - Sleep Forever [Slow Death Records - 2011]“Sleep Forever” is the second release from French two piece HNW/ brutal ambient project The Sandman Wears a Mask. This new release finds the pair bluring the lines between HNW, Static texturing and noise bound ambience to create an album that’s heady in a brutal yet slightly surreal dream tinged sonic world. The projects first untitled album dealt with layering field recordings under 'walls' of atmospherically textured noise, “Sleep Forever” offers up eight tracks of hypnotic, atmospheric and creepily psychedelic noise ambince and often slow moving atmospheric noise texturing. The eight tracks run between just under the five minute mark, to spot on the ten minute mark a piece. Each track finds the pair skilfully laying out layers of: judders, groans, creepy stuck static jitter’s, eerier cable texturing, slow muffled drones, flutter and stuck insect real structures, and all manner of uneasy yet gentle seared sonic matter. The first and last tracks fall more into the HNW bracket, but the six tracks inbetween are a noise ambient/textured noise hybrid. The CDR comes in the labels trademark red paper sleeve and features a great creepy picture/drawing of a coloured preacher with a handkerchief face mask on holding what looks like a open bible and a bottle of drink, standing in front of a graffiti covered wall. So “Sleep Forever” offers up a very intriguing, disturbing and brutal highbred of ambience, noise and surreal/ nightmarish atmospherics. Roger Batty
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