It was a Tuesday night at The Spectral Club, that repurposed taxidermy parlor on Gristle Ave that smells like dead fur and microwaved battery acid. I walked in and the fog machines were already howling like poltergeists with sinus infections. The air was thick with VHS static projected from three busted tube TVs stacked like an altar to forgotten cable channels. Sleep People hadn’t even played a note and I was already hallucinating dial tones.
The place was packed with the usual crew—zine heads, burned-out psych majors, and the kind of kids who only drink NyQuil recreationally. First up: Ectoplasm Fax, who played one song that lasted seventeen minutes, consisted entirely of reversed dial-up tones and a bassline that felt like a vertebrae adjustment from a Ouija board. Their lead singer wore a hazmat suit and kept whispering "we are all malware" into a condenser mic run through a Speak & Spell.
Then Bandaid Oracle took the stage—two women, one synth, one busted carousel slide projector looping shots of abandoned malls. They played a song called “Antiseptic Heartbreak” that sounded like Broadcast covering Suicide after a dental procedure. The crowd just stood still, absorbing it like trauma or shortwave radio signals. I wept and blamed it on the fog.
And then came Sleep People.
They opened with the title track from Sleep People, and it was like listening to a lullaby written by a mainframe that had been crying for 10,000 years. Guitars were processed through tape loops that bled into synth textures so slow they felt like tectonic shifts. I wrote in my notebook, “this is what REM sleep would sound like if it had a subscription to Maximumrocknroll and smoked clove cigarettes.”
Midway through the set, someone handed me a blank cassette and said, “record your dreams.” I pocketed it, of course. When I played it back the next day, all I heard was the sound of an old man humming “My Sharona” underwater. Which means it worked.
Sleep People closed with “Dust Memory,” a track that layered a voicemail apology from 1983 over a slowed-down dial tone and flute samples. I think I saw my childhood flash before me in the haze, or maybe it was just a rerun of Knight Rider bleeding in from the bar TV.
This wasn’t just a gig. It was a séance in four-four time.
FINAL VERDICT:
Bring earplugs, bring your dreams, bring your therapist. Sleep People don’t play shows — they broadcast frequencies from the edges of consciousness and let you rot blissfully in their static.
I’m not even sure I made it home. But I woke up with a ticket stub in my boot and fog in my lungs.
– Buzz
(First published in CREASE MAGAZINE, folded between reviews of Psychic TV bootlegs and a classified ad for ghost-infested drum machines.)
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