The Great Schizm - The Sleeper's Night Journey

The Great Schizm

The Sleeper's Night Journey 
Cloud Hunter Records; 2014

4.0 out of 5 - TOP ALBUM

By J Simpson

Dreams are strange things; refractions of our daily life, pertaining to reality, but at the same time, different than. An alien otherness pervades the scenes that haunt us while we sleep. It can also be difficult to say whether a dream may be "good" or "bad", there may be elements of terror and sadness, mixed with wild elation. They simply ARE - confining to their own logic.

Each song on The Sleeper's Night Journey is its own little snowglobe universe, with its own physics. The shifts, however, are subtle and ebbing, rather than abrupt jump-cuts, so you almost can't notice the terrain undulating around you.

The Sleeper's Night Journey by  The Great Schizm is ambient music, in every sense of the word; it is beat less, other than the rhythm of waving, lapping sine waves; it could be used as background music, in the manner of Erik Satie/Brian Eno's "furniture music", sound sculptures to explore and examine, leaving them to gather dust in the corner; and it is ambient in the sense of "ambience", the suggestion of space, as these tone poems seem to evoke starry realms and wide-open landscapes, maybe from another planet, or this one, viewed from a far off time or place.

“TSNJ” is an even split between traditional ambient and dark ambient, and stacks up against monolithic recordings of either genre. His compositions glimmer with the same alien ominous wonder as Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works II or Brian Eno's Apollo Soundtracks, with a similar depiction of zero gravity as the latter. It also features the ghastly, ghostly clanks, creaks, and groans of dark ambient titans like Lustmord, older Rapoon, and Raison D' Etre, but are a little less menacing. This suggests making peace with the dream lords, at the center of the labyrinth, rather than being terrified of them.

The Great Schizm avoids a lot of the pitfalls that lesser ambient producers fall into, by keeping his soundscapes constantly evolving, and morphing, making them organic ecosystems, rather than dead, jittering loops. On top of this, his usage of reverb is exceptional, making things sound vast and far away, but still keeping them reined in, and swallowing the mix. He also has a musical ear, with dense, lush pads, grand classical chords time-stretched to infinity, becoming a bridge towards your outer thoughts.

I would give you a play by play, but that would be like giving you a roadmap, and would erase the sense of wandering wonderment that this album naturally evokes.

The Sleeper's Night Journey's greatest achievement is the blending of the light and dark, of the terrifying and the sublime. The pretty moments are truly beautiful, and thankfully, it mostly hovers around weird and uncomfortable, rather than truly horrifying. This would make an excellent introduction, for someone looking to get into the darker shades of ambient synth music.

Top notch. Can't stop listening!

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