Sleep Well [Vinyl]

The English duo Persher, Arthur Cayzer (Pariah) and Jamie Roberts (Blawan), take the same subversive, boundaryless approach to extreme music that underpins their electronic explorations. Their individual singles output are highly anticipated in the dance world in part because of their affinity expression beyond a trend. The debut album Sleep Well is ferocious and innovative. Cayzer and Roberts take a decidedly unconventional approach to writing, using the full potential of the studio in their exploration of extreme music. What sounds like a live band performance is more often than not an amalgam of many different sessions, the duo applying techniques from electronic music to heavier sonics. Recording in Roberts’ studio at Funkhaus, the home of the former East German state-owned radio station, Cayzer would improvise long takes on guitar and bass, contorted and mutated by Robert’s using his extensive modular setup to add weight and texture. This primordial ooze of raw sonics was then chopped up and reassembled into bristling hooks and corrosive atmospheres. The duo’s playful, exuberant approach to music is evident in their absurdist themes and lyrics. Much of the album is inspired by “really disgusting food”. Medieval Soup from the Milkbar refrences the epically bad meal of gray, gruel-like soup, and seeps into the track’s noxious slurry and stomach-churning riffs. “Portable Aquarium” was born of a cup of herbal tea over flowing with foliage. Their playful and often self-deprecating sense of humor allows them to find inspiration in the smallest of life’s events. Persher’s Sleep Well provides a daring, revelatory expansion on heavy music’s myriad mutations. The duo uses their production skills and their humor to embrace the powerful release they find in extreme. Persher’s debut album exudes the sheer joy of making music unconstrained by genre-boundaries, as gleefully weird as it is visceral and primal.