Posts Tagged ‘sleep’

Well, it’s that time of year again when we here at the Live4ever Ezine begin to trail back through 12 months worth of musical delights in a vain attempt to group our favourites of 2011 into some sort of coherent list we like to call Live4ever’s Essential Listening.

Over the coming weeks, we’ll be presenting our most cherished gigs, tracks and albums of the year, in the hope that our highlights from 52 weeks worth of sonic adventure will inspire you to investigate our essential picks of 2011, as well as sharing your own favourites with us.

Check back next week for Live4ever’s Essential Listening 2011 – The Tracks, and when you’ve been through our stand-out gigs of the year, don’t forget to leave a comment below to tell the world of your memorable gig-going experiences of 2011.

The saga of San Jose stoner rock titans Sleep is as strange and sordid as the slow, dread-ridden dirges that they have become known for throughout the course of their convoluted career.

From their inauspicious beginnings as anarcho-punk band Asbestosdeath to their premature dissolution and subsequent decade-plus of inactivity, the narrative that runs alongside each of the group’s releases reads like some ancient inscrutable parable pulled from the pages of a preternatural text.

Their 1991 debut ‘Volume One‘ immediately helped to cultivate their catastrophic image, to the point that shortly after it was issued guitarist Justin Marler mysteriously disappeared, only to turn up sometime later as a monk in an Eastern Orthodox monastery. The remaining members – Matt Pike, Al Cisneros, and Chris Hakius – blindly mailed out a demo of their latest work to Earache Records, who then released the recording as is, resulting in 1992’s genre-defining ‘Sleep’s Holy Mountain‘.