Sleep D x Ad Lib Collective: Flashed Glass

- There’s always been an uneasy standoff between the classical and popular music worlds. There are a lot of reasons for this. Some are aesthetic, but there are a whole lot more: cultural, economic, class-based; it’s a real warzone. Even when someone tries to make nice, bridge the yawning abyss between the traditions, it isn’t easy and sometimes the gestures get slapped aside, pretty hard. For instance, I might say that not every meeting of classical music and electronica has to be as vomitously bad as William Orbit. I’ll back that one up if anyone’s in a fighting mood, but perhaps we should talk instead about a new musical detente being worked up by Sleep D and the Ad Lib Collective?

Melbourne / Naarm based Sleep D is Maryos Syawish and Corey Kikos, ambient-technoheads whose Butter Sessions label, with its expansive roster of electronic talent from down that way, has been going just about as long as they have, both celebrating an epic ten years in the business. The Ad Lib Collective is a similarly veteran set of performers (although by classical standards, still pretty fresh-faced), who, since 2009, have been taking a chamber music set of skills and finding unusual situations to use them in. The core members are percussionist Thea Rossen and saxophonist Jesse Deane, with regular contributors including violist Jared Yapp, another percussionist in Hamish Upton and, for this outing they’re reinforced by Ben Opie’s oboe and still another percussionist in Zela Papageorgiou.

One of those unusual situations I mentioned is their own Play On series, which was minted in 2016. In their words and in the face of “a global shift in the way audiences engage with live music ... Play On has upended and revitalised the concert experience.” The key element of this, as you may have guessed, is putting classical and electronic musos to work, together, on stage. These collaborations have been, understandably, thin on the ground for the last year or two, but Play On is back and even upping-the-ante, becoming a record label to capture the meeting of Sleep D x Ad Lib Collective in six cuts, called Flashed Glass.

The recording process was fractured, beginning with all contributors in the one studio, but, interrupted by multiple lockdowns, cobbled together from what was captured, it finished in various home studios, all over the place. For all that, thanks to the trademark warm and reverb-heavy atmosphere of Sleep D, nothing on the record sounds stressed, maybe a bit spaced ...and also huge - like a whale, just luxuriating in the big cloudy ocean.

The opening cut and eight minute single, Cavern, reminds me of some of the more easygoing Massive Attack instrumentals, although the simple, electro beat sounds like it was cribbed from one of their more ominous classics, Angel. Like them, Sleepy D dabble in dub and you can get your fill on the big dub b-side version. There are lovely string flourishes on Cavern, but if you’re wondering where all of Ad-Lib’s percussive talent is, you can hear them on Enclave, marimba-ing it up, which has that Philip Glass feel or maybe a bit of Geinoh Yamashirogumi thanks to the synths which Sleep D slide, with a prickle of distortion, across the top.

Canyon heads for pure ambience, combining synths and percussion which just serves to flesh out the timbre. It’s adorned with Ben Opie’s oboe, which is a real plus, wherever it appears. It’s like with nearly every piece the artists picked a landscape then worked out how to try and evoke it. The rising, bubbling percussive loop of Lagoons, certainly does that. The cute synth and beat have a nearly 8-bit quality to them. It’s all very cartoonish and friendly, right up until the eerie flute loop, god knows what that’s about, but it sounds like it’s from the soundtrack to Aliens.

Unequivocally my favourite cut here is Chambers, which finally lets the instrumental soloists off the leash, beginning with another haunting snatch from Ben Opie on his oboe. It’s a shame that it soon takes a back seat, but we’re adequately compensated by strings ducking in and out and a lurid sax line. It all builds to an urgent climax, scintillatingly underwritten by Jared Yapp’s viola; how often does anyone say that about viola?

The sax is back on closer Shelter, paired with a quiet but echoing dub-reggae beat. The understated effectiveness takes me back to the meetings of DJ Krush and trumpeter Toshinori Kondo, reminding you both how good it can be and how rare it is to hear outings of this kind.

There’s plenty to like about Flashed Glass, a pulsating cloud of harmonic gas tinged with chamber highlights shining like stars in the nebula. I am left wondering about the artistic meeting, the mismatches between the olympic-level-training and high intellectualism of chamber music and the night-long vamping of dancefloor-chic. Difference, change, these things are not easy and the world of music is in a tumult of change, one which persistently threatens to drag music makers under if they don’t try and ride the wave, as best they can. Two great artistic traditions, very rarely in harmony, have reached out to each other here and I can only guess what the individuals involved got out of it. I might just have to stop second-guessing everybody else and enjoy a meeting of minds, in a moment of sweet music.

- Chris Cobcroft.
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