Enfolded In Luxury

In an interview with musician and critic Michel Henritzi, Kim Pieters of Sleep noted that “My emphasis in improvisation is on mutual exchange, on dialogue. A relationship between subjects, each person is responsible for their contribution.” On Enfolded In Luxury, the quartet of Pieters, Peter Stapleton, Nathan Thompson and Su Ballard achieve such mutual exchange, but it expands beyond the inter-personal into the spatial – you can hear not only that these are musicians engaging in dialogue, but that the collective is in dialogue with their immediate surroundings, through their awareness of sound’s transmission through space (in this case, a studio in Purakaunui, Otago). As with many of their peers, and the members’ own other outfits (Sandoz Lab Technicians, Rain, Flies Inside The Sun, etc.), Sleep engage rock instrumentation in startingly un-rock ways, while the regular interruptions of violin, synth, and shortwave radio act as welcome disruptors.