Sleepwalker

Hi, my name is Brett Purchase. Forrest asked me to contribute to this blog while we were drinking over the weekend and I thought "Why the fuck not?" I have played in the Seattle area black metal bands Scatha and Addaura and I'm currently working on a new metal project in Bellingham. I mainly listen to metal (black, doom, thrash, and everything in between), punk (crust, hardcore, old school) and some post-rock.

Sleepwalker – Demo 2009

This demo came to me by way of Aesop Dekker’s (Ludicra, Agalloch) prolific music blog The Cosmic Hearse. Sleepwalker is the mysterious side project of southern California’s Fell Voices, a black metal band that has garnered a sustainable reputation after their first crushing release. Sleepwalker’s three song demo, clocking in at just over twenty-three minutes, mixes clean chanting vocals with distant sounding black metal vocals. Throughout the demo hardy amounts of guitar feedback are utilized, and mixed alongside reverberating keyboards, they create a soundscape like fog building at the bottom of an empty valley. Sleepwalker’s demo perfects a sound I didn’t even realize existed, noise that is so overwhelming and intense that it conveys a feeling of emptiness and desolation.

What I appreciate most about this release is the secretive nature surrounding the project: no website, no myspace, no facebook – just three relentless tracks of low-fi atmospheric black metal. In an age of almost complete transparency between bands and listeners, Sleepwalker brings the unknown back to metal. Rumors are going around of a full length release in the works, but it is unlikely that Sleepwalker will ever be a touring band, and this listener is perfectly content with that.

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