Review: Empathy Family – Sleep Transmission

I used to live in a mobile home in the middle of nowhere in the woods of central Texas. One time I took MDMA and laid in my room on the bare plywood floor. Elevated plywood floors are great at transmitting vibration. The house had no air conditioning, and this is Texas, so of course it’s hot so I opened the window to let the wind blow in and to stare at the stars.
After some time of laying in silence and darkness I realized the instruments in the room were quietly ringing out as the wind playing over the strings, my room being the “practice room” where everyone’s gear was. I turned on all the amps and laid back down to let the wind play its feedback music and drifted off into my own experience with it.

This is a lot like that.

Opening with cacophony and immediately turning to waves of bluish purple sound, sounds that evoke images in me like yawning monsters and children hiding. Empathy Family is either very capable of evoking intense emotions in the listener, or I’m in the middle of a personal crisis, one or the other. Either way, Sleep Transmission fucks me up.
Within the first two tracks I’m struck by several different feelings that range from longing to fear and sadness. There’s a lot of loneliness that seems to be the interplay of the “one” and “the other” and it seems like this was definitely intended. I feel like all the fear has drained out by track 3, at which point it’s almost like the wind is singing, only to return with prejudice in track 8.
I wish I knew more about the location this comes from, because it definitely has the vibe of adhering to something I’ve heard called the “philosophy of geography” or “philosophy of place”.

[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]The Atlantic Ocean’s winds taint the metallic cities it must affront, and remains a sound, the natural worlds drowsy way of meeting a humanity it doesn’t recognize, here is what is left of that dialogue between the aquatic world and what we have made of our humanity. [/perfectpullquote] Yeah something sort of like that I guess. Or maybe I’m just super emotional.