Caspian

Sleeping States

This is something somebody else once said about sleepingstates:

“Enter Sleeping States. Dr Robert Moog, inventor of the Moog synthesiser, may have recently left the planet, but Sleeping State’s lead-singer, Markland Starkie, is reinventing the concept. Starkie looks like a mad scientist on stage, hovering over his audio experiments and twisting dials.

First he takes a Fisher Price radio to his guitar, and then what looks like a hairdryer, pressing them against the pickups he works up an electromagnetic drone. Once the drone meets his required standards, he stands up at the microphone and begins to sing. He sounds like Jeff Buckley malfunctioning over a railway station PA. This is a band designed from its atoms up never to break into the mainstream. Starkie’s sprawling lyrics fall like a balm over the white noise and whale song of his guitar, but it all swings quickly from the gorgeous to the totally inaccessible. The band is often drowned out by the babble of the crowd, but Sleeping States don’t care one bit. Starkie just presses a short-circuiting Dictaphone to his guitar pick-ups and smiles out into the dark.”

- Chris Stevens, www.new-noise.net

15/07/07