Glaswegian Home Listening
On Sleepwalk, Glasgow’s legendary Optimo, or to give the club its full name, Optimo (Espacio), takes you out from the subterranean possibilities of the nightclub into some deep, deep, inner space.
Sleepwalk is a listening collection. Where you might choose to listen to it is half the fun: a psychedelic meadow, a hot air balloon or an autumnally damp West End flat in Glasgow all come to mind. Just as genre defying as the tracks you’d hear on the dancefloor, Sleepwalk comes across like a beautiful blur. Not so much soft focus as a misted up lens. Drifting across the mix is Damon’s Gypsy psyche, bucolic analogue ennui from mid-70s Germany, Lee Hazelwood at his most dissolute and intoxicated, Duke Ellington played straight, Arthur Russell and Karen Dalton juxtaposed as spectral songwriters, and a whole lot of fragments of considered musical beauty.
If you associate the likes of Nurse With Wound, Coil, Tuxedomoon and Chris & Cosey with the sturm und drang of machine music be prepared to be seduced by the tracks here that sting and soothe with their clarity, like the very best eye drops. exhilarating, inclusive, outsider party fun. Did Raymond Scott ever sound so narcotic? Were the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band on remand?
Forget the square version of downtempo or late night chill out, Sleepwalk reconnects home listening to its lineage at its abstract best. This is a mixtape put together for your mind’s eye.











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