The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters. The title and band name refer to a late 18th century image by Francisco Goya that depicts a sleeping man surrounded by large cats, owls, and bats, presumably the stuff of his dreams. Supposedly, this reflected Goya's understanding of art as the dynamic interaction between reason (this was the heyday of the Age of Enlightenment) and the numinous imaginary. Today, this phrase is pregnant with different meaning, which I will not get into here. Still, it is a thoughtful and telling phrase.

And the music, well, is something very much of the current turbulent era rather than the pretensions toward logical fixedness of the Enlightenment, which admittedly had and has its own monsters to grapple with. The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters leans toward the monsters, now in the confrontational cathartic sense. It dispels the myth of these creatures of romanticism (or radical reactionism) and doubles down a revolutionary project of abandonment in pursuit of a new musical path forward.

The Sleep is a quartet comprised of turntables (Mariam Rezaei), drums (Lukas Koenig), trumpet (Gabriele Mitelli), saxophone (Mette Rasmussen) and a lot of electronics (everyone, minus Rasmussen). To linger on the latter for a moment, this is very much in the vein of ŘKSE, another Rasmussen project, stylistically, albeit with less hip hop. Actually, between that release, her punk-infused collaboration with MoE, and TSRPM, it seems Rasmussen has her finger on the pulse of a new avant-garde for lovers of clunky free jazz, who were raised on electro, punk rock, hip hop, and the like.

The music here is some sort of dense and fractured free cyber punk. The percussive and twisted techno backbeats root this in the experimental electronics and turntablism of the early 2000s and, in a strange, spasmodic way, much of this feels danceable. There are passages that evoke the sweaty grunge and pluck of a local hardcore show, complete with the insistent chugga-chugga drumbeats and heavy cymbal work one would expect in such a setting, or the electroclash of the Locust, minus the grindcore spazz. Other sections, such as the seventh track, "Reason", surround the listener with a glitched out crossfire of zaps, beats, and honks. It is a mindfuck if you try to focus on a single thread. This one is followed by "I Said 'No'", a slowly churning soundscape that is much less aggressive, but no less effective and disorienting. Meanwhile, Mitelli, who contributes looping brass and vocals on a few tracks, and Rasmussen drag this back into the contemporary free improv sphere as they spit out furious fanfares and rippling tides of tone.

Again, this is very much both part of and a step beyond a very special musical moment that others such as Sélébéyone, Anguish, Moor Mother, Ignaz Schick and a few others have been carving out. Here's to The Sleep for waking us up to it and offering hope of new and exhilarating sonic reconstitution in these shattered technotopic times.