Dreaming is free: The world is a ball of confusion, a wild world, a world a turnin', it's a mad, mad world, a globe shaped sphere floating in a sea of holes. There The Open Spaces (Misra) by English navel gazer Sleeping States addresses the inanity of the world, the album a wall of sound album built on swift eddies of instrumental colors, whispered, Thom Yorke-inspired  vocals, and scattershot melodies.

Think OK Computer, My Bloody Valentine's Loveless, Fleetwood Mac's Future Games. Markland Starkie is Sleeping States' one man band, performing on drums, bent guitars, sampler, found sounds, and the rest. There The Open Spaces recalls some art exhibit on the claustrophobic nature of urban spaces, with its jumble of seemingly disconnected sonic threads: a watery detuned guitar, childrens' voices, street sounds, and lazy vocals cohesively smashed together like wet molecules in a summer rainstorm. Yet Starkie's vocals are honeyed and sweet, the stuff of autumnal daydreams. Taken together, the music of Sleeping States rises slowly, playfully, and childlike, then twists into experimental shapes.

Recorded entirely on a four track machine in Starkie's London home, the album has attracted the favor of UK indie pop icons like the Klaxons' Simon Taylor-Davis and Grizzly Bear's Ed Droste, who have praised Sleeping States in various publications.

Simon Taylor-Davis told Pitchfork, the supposed e-bible of hip (pity about the quality of the site's penmanship): "[Starkie] makes these beautiful songs over detuned guitars, they're recorded on a four track and possess this impromptu one-take charm to them. You read a lot about people making records about what London sounds like, but his songs are the only thing that ever reminds me what its like to be there..."

Ed Droste of Grizzly Bear told yet another e-zine: "It's weird when a song comes out of nowhere and ends up being one of your favorite musical discoveries of the year. It wasn't until I stumbled across his site and saw the video for the song ‘Rivers' [MP3 available here for your pleasure] that I fell in love." That video can be found at: http://www.sleepingstates.co.uk/

A former member of such bands as Kaito, Kontra Punkte, Homocrime, Undereducated and Tome (who is releasing a new album in the UK), Starkie benefits from classical music training and is proficient on many instruments. Starkie covers a lot of ground in his spent songs, from the Dean Martin-tinted crooning of "Come Closer To Me Now," the thrumming guitar and whacked drums of "I Wonder," and the spoken word sleep walking of "Planning My Escape" to the found-sound lunacy of "The Times I Have Fallen For You."

There The Open Spaces is gentle, windswept music for sleeping states, be they nocturnal or of the daytime variety.

 Sleeping States
"Rivers" (mp3)
from "There the Open Spaces"
(Misra)

More On This Album

Wake up your bolshy yarblockos!: Once you've rubbed the sleep from your eyes and returned to the land of the living, give a listen to Para One's Epiphanie (Institubes/Naïve). This progressive IDM album by Jean-Baptiste de Laubier, aka Para One, is the kind of electronic beats'n'dribbles machine music that will have your brain wired for everything the day can offer.

"Dundun-Dun"