INTERVIEWS
Sleep D, familiar ground, 'Big Sky, Liquid Sun'
The Naarm/Melbourne duo, heads of much revered label Butter Sessions, share some words on their latest release.
It’s hard to find something new to say about Naarm/Melbourne duo Sleep D. The pair, Corey Kikos and Maryos Syawish, have been producing music under the name for going on 12 years, and have remained a lasting pillar of Australia’s most ‘underground’ scenes.
Heads of the much revered Butter Sessions, the duo have had a lasting and unignorable impact on the ‘sound’ of Australia not only through their music, but their dedication to the music of those around them, both nationally and across the globe.
This awareness of the world they live in, not only musically but naturally, is at the core of their latest release, ‘Big Sky, Liquid Sun.’ Amid a career so comfortably and confidently influencing the culture around them, this release sees Corey and Maryos surrendering themselves entirely to the world at large.
Wholly natural track titles like ‘Mountain Ash’ and ‘Magma Flow’ paint a picture that the pair’s brand of forward-thinking, dub-laden techno thrives in. At the core of each track, a feeling of motion synonymous with the changing seasons, shifting land and the bubbling core of the earth itself.
To the uninitiated, this kind of language to describe dance music may appear entirely unnecessary, and hey, maybe it is. But to those who have witnessed Sleep D perform, they’ll be all too familiar with the grounding, earthly feeling of the music that they record and perform.
While in its own way it is tough to speak on a pair of artists so regularly spoken about, there’s no denying that at this point, they can speak for themselves.
Mixmag ANZ secured a moment of Corey and Maryos’ time to reflect on ‘Big Sky, Liquid Sun’.
Q: Guys, it’s such a pleasure to ask you some questions. You’ve got no shortage of releases under your belt, but I’d love to know when a project feels ‘complete’ to you?
SLEEP D: Thanks for having us!
It may be cliche, but you know when you know. There’s no formula or checklist to know when a track is complete, and that’s part of the challenge. Often we sit on tracks for a while and listen to them in different environments, like while driving, going for a walk or run, basically anywhere out of the studio. Sometimes things come together really quickly and you just know it’s done.
Q: ‘Big Sky, Liquid Sun’ is cohesive. It moves in a way that feels natural. Many “EPs” can often feel like a collection of songs, but this doesn’t, at least not to me. Is that kind of progression something you’ve done on purpose here?
SLEEP D: Thank you! It’s intentional, yes. Most of the time we like to create a journey or narrative, whether it’s for an EP or an LP. It may come from a background of listening to records front to back and enjoying that listening process and story the artist is telling. We think that process has been lost to a degree with the advent of streaming and other mediums of listening to music, but it’s something we still enjoy and feel like it gives you a proper insight into an artist's world.
Q: There’s a clear ‘natural’ kind of imagery being conjured in all of the namings & mimicked in the sound of each track. Why is nature such an important aspect of this release?
SLEEP D: We both love being outdoors and exploring the bush or waterways as often as we can. It’s often a source of inspiration. We also use a lot of field recordings and frequently gravitate towards an organic yet synthetic sound. One of us recently moved out about an hour east of Melbourne into the valleys and mountains by the Yarra River, we spent many days working on these tracks out there.
The natural world is a big part of the sounds and names on this EP, but we’ve always titled tracks with a heavy inspiration from nature, from “Bush Snake” to “Freak of Nature” and “Red Rock”. With instrumental music, giving a song a title can help guide the listener to go where we’re trying to take them. Maybe this is the first time we’ve made more of a point of it in the visual and written identity of the release.
Q: I was lucky enough to catch you playing in that monstrous ‘Circle of Live’ jam with Kuniyuki & Sebastian Mullaert, which, after such a long time has admittedly become a bit hazy. Were any of these tracks featured in that set, & have you been playing any of it live before the release?
SLEEP D: That set was completely improvised. We had jammed together, but not with Sebastian or Kuniyuki. We met Sebastian for the first time a few hours before we played! It made for a super fun and exhilarating live session, but no room to feature previously cooked ideas.
We did play early versions of ‘Green Thumbs’ and ‘Acheron Cauldron’ and a super early version of ‘Mountain Ash’ at some live shows like Now or Never and Animals Dancing X Butter Sessions NYE. Green Thumbs was written for the intro to those sets. We’ll commonly turn tracks for live sets into studio versions, turning them inside out beyond recognition.
Q: You’ve become increasingly synonymous with these live moments. How ‘live’ are these songs?
SLEEP D: The way you hear them now is very much a refined studio version. Some elements were born in the live world but came to maturity in the studio.
Q: I often hear the word ‘techno’ mentioned when people describe your music. Would you call it that?
SLEEP D: It depends on which night you ask us. We sometimes play techno, we sometimes play ambient, house or more discombobulated sounds. We try not to focus on genres, we prefer to be adaptive to the party, environment and our feelings at the time.
Q Are there any changes or additions to the gear that you usually use that helped bring this release together?
SLEEP D: The Intellijel Metropolix was used for the initial idea on a lot of the basslines and lead lines. It can get quite complex and spit out sequences and melodies that a human couldn’t necessarily play, which can then be recorded as MIDI and further refined. It’s a fun way to come up with new ideas.
Q: What do you think this release does or says that others or yours haven’t?
SLEEP D: We’d like to think it’s like a time stamp of our lives over the past year or so. It speaks to the broad range of sounds, speeds and moods we like to work with and hopefully showcases that in a more refined offering.
Q: From the outside, it would appear that your sound is totally dialled in, like a well oiled machine. Looking to the future, what do you want to do that you haven’t done already?
SLEEP D: Thank you! We’d love to collaborate with more friends and instrumentalists and create some deeper listening albums.
Stay tuned!
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'Big Sky, Liquid Sun' is available for purchase via Butter Sessions' Bandcamp & listenable via streaming services.
Jack Colquhoun is Mixmag ANZ's Editor, find him on Instagram.
