Synth-Pop Outliers Sleepkit Unveil New Sophomore Album Camp Emotion feat. Hypnagogic Title Track
Sleepkit is a band who can genuinely be described as mind-expanding; from the nucleus of their songwriting to the texturally-ornamented arrangements, they manage to imbue each aspect of their music with a sly veneer of otherness. Sprung from the minds of songwriters, singers & co-founders Ryan Bourne (Chad VanGaalen, Ghostkeeper, Plant City Band) and Marie Sulkowski (Texture Twins), Sleepkit’s repertoire showcases a band whose serious understanding of the pop song is buffered by beautifully detailed texture and a penchant for the slightly skewed.
Bolstered by the addition of drummer Eric Hamelin (Alvvays, Joyful Talk, Ghostkeeper) and multi-instrumentalist Joleen Toner (Crystal Eyes, Plant City Band), Sleepkit are sharing their sophomore album, Camp Emotion, a nuanced and emotionally unarmoured refinement of their singular brand of experimental pop. Produced by Scott ‘Monty’ Munro, a prolific producer and multi-instrumentalist known for his work with Preoccupations, Chad VanGaalen, Lab Coast, and Ghostkeeper, Camp Emotion actualizes their idiosyncratic art-pop vision in a shimmering opus that explores the outer edges of song creation – functioning as well as a dancefloor soundtrack as it does a hazy, late-night headphone session through inner space.
The music behind “Camp Emotion,” the LP’s title track, came out of a late-night solo campfire session where Bourne was jamming on a little Yamaha Portasound keyboard. “The dubby feel of the demo reminded me vaguely of “Ghetto Defendant’’ by The Clash, so I asked Hamelin if he’d be our Allen Ginsberg,” Bourne explains. “He recited these great automatic phrases – partially addressing his son Sonny – into this giant old sampler Monty had gifted us, which we then messed with using varispeed and delay until they sounded totally demented.” The original campfire recording book-ends the track.
The album is an honest document of where we were at personally, collectively and musically – a really free exploration of emotion, psyche, spirit, tone, harmony and song craft. We’d tossed around calling it ‘Spectral,’ as a reference both to mental health stuff we’d experienced and the spectrum of visible light (with a nod to the paranormal), but landed on ‘Camp Emotion’, which seemed to evoke all of that but also sounded like a culty summer camp for neurodivergent adults… so it’s a kind of catharsis and meditation on our inner and outer worlds, for better and worse, with a specific devotion musically to the weird and the beautiful.
Though each song on ‘Camp Emotion’ stands on own, the album is meant to be enjoyed in one unbroken sitting. The songs run one into the next with a few second break at the halfway mark, like sides of a mixtape – a little reprieve from the fragmented, attention-eroding mode in which we tend to consume media and, more and more, art itself. Long live the LP!
– Ryan Bourne
Just hangin’ around Sonny
I will be your clown… (Camp Emotion)
The clouds have parted now there is light
Rainmaker wander, move dust aside… (Rainmaker)
The seeds of Sleepkit were sown thanks to Ryan and Marie’s shared membership in fellow outer-limits-leaners Devonian Gardens, whose two albums allowed the two to find their patch of common ground. That band’s stylistically wide-ranging approach is largely eschewed in favour of Sleepkit’s more streamlined sound, one that reconciles their textural inventiveness and zoned playing techniques with the immediacy of dance music and their inherently approachable songs. They released their debut Champion Weekend LP in 2016, an amalgam of sunshiny dream-pop, post-disco and psychedelic synth-rock with shades of Giorgio Moroder to The Stooges to ELO.
