The realm of sleep, dreams, and the unconscious are prime fodder for sonic art, as visual mediums are always hard-pressed to capture the disorienting and often nonsensical nature of these cerebral spaces. Even so, while swaths of great art in every medium are based around representing these concepts, they’re usually not quite there, tending to be either too comprehensible or too abstract. Dreams are so often built around what we know, presenting our reality back to us, but with strange seams between ideas, emotions, and scenarios that can never be fully explained. The self-titled debut by Sleep Paralysis is very probably the closest facsimile to this experience that I have encountered in the waking world.

Multi-instrumentalist and composer Stephen Knapp’s latest project, Sleep Paralysis is an album that presents a new conceptual or psychological theme with each track, the titles very clearly describing what the music is meant to represent. Abstract passages of blistering dissonance are constantly grounded in more familiar melodic and rhythmic ideas, preventing the album from turning fully into a wall of psychosis. These arrangements maintain feelings that most any listener can comprehend and relate to, even though it may at times be at the edges of their emotional memory. While rooted in metal and classical, two genres that have respectively long and WAY longer histories of overindulgent performance, Sleep Paralysis might be one of the least superfluous albums to display such incredible musicianship and superb writing. Even at its most indulgent, the song and its concepts come first. 

The strange and unsettling combination of genres makes the dreamlike experience across the album all the more acute. Expert production tricks suck the listener out of swirling black metal-style dissonance into chiptunes motifs that cast the imagination into a wholly different pixel count. Mischievous piano themes become far more urgent when interlocking with furious drums, guitar, and bass, creating the sense that Pee-Wee Herman has found himself trapped in the Meat Circus from the final level of the 2005 video game Psychonauts. This album may even include the first ever instance of cool-guy finger snaps (à la West Side Story) and blast beats (à la Cannibal Corpse) in the same song. The final track, “Nostalgia”, really drives this unpredictable creativity home by incorporating the famous THX swell and the infamous Windows XP error sound into the music with aplomb.

Sleep Paralysis is a post-modern masterpiece presented through a variety of modern musical stylings. Post-modernism is essential to its presentation, just as our memories, associations, and cultural capital are essential to make post-modernism impactful. What are dreams if not personalized, post-modernist vignettes? This album presents aural vignettes of the same fashion, for the listener to experience and make personal as they will.

10/10

About the author’s biases:

Elijah has had night terrors and extremely vivid dreams since he was a wee lad and also suffers from anxiety and imposter syndrome pretty much all the dang time. What fun.