Brian Grainger - The Endless Sleep (2019)

It has been seven years since Brian Grainger issued his subdued double-album Ultraboreal with Organic Industries, and as the Spring season slowly thaws out the Winter-buried midwestern American valley that Brian now calls home, new colors are in bloom, full fruits have ripened on the branches and vines. Brian's work has always been tangential and exploratory, so it should surprise absolutely no one that his newest libations run over the edges of their goblets, a second double-album bearing the name The Endless Sleep.

Unlike Ultraboreal, this album has a much more detailed narrative to unravel, and comes with a past of its own casting a shadow across the twenty tracks and two-and-a-half hour runtime. In 2007, Brian was invited to perform under his Milieu alias at the Lab30 Electroconference in Augsburg, Germany. While there, he inevitably got to meet and subsequently collaborate with many different artists, labels and creative minds. One such mind was a novice film director (who has at the present time preferred to remain unnamed), who was a fan of Brian's recordings and extended the offer to produce a soundtrack for his first film, the ill-fated Die Schlafende Erde. Upon returning home to the United States, Brian set about drafting many of the pieces presented on this release, using only a folder of photographs (mostly filming locations and abstract "textural" indicators) and an early copy of the screenplay by the director's then-girlfriend, Belle. Filming began after Brian had laid about fifty minutes of audio to tape, and seemed to be proceeding well, until Summer of 2008, when a fire consumed the entirety of the shot footage and the director's equipment in a garden shed. Tragically, none of these things could be replaced or redone, as the director had already nearly maxed out several credit cards and loans to pay for everything. Brian was given the blessing to finish his recordings when and if he felt inspired to, along with the screenplay text and photography that accompanies the physical edition of The Endless Sleep, while the director opted to take a job as an editor and focus on that until he could return to his own ideas.

So, in this way, The Endless Sleep represents an image of a history that is otherwise unseen and intangible. The music, and screenplay text, are all that remains of the original idea - a mind forever doomed to wander the Earth without a body. A ghost creeping across a dried out forest floor like a sour brown fog, a distant noise without a provenance or an explanation...an eroded island lost in a weeping and windy sea. The Endless Sleep is the shape of something that is empty, forced to cave in on itself like an unfinished pyramid weathering eons of elements. Somewhat appropriately, the music contained on the album reflects all of these things, despite being given a clear and distinct purpose at their outset. They have come to define themselves around their very nature as being undefined, like so much rippling tape unspooling onto a stone floor...they buzz and vibrate as true drones, pure instinct and muscle memory, void of navigation or independent movement. Even the instrumental source of The Endless Sleep is often ambiguous and indecipherable - at times, a guitar will lean out of the haze, or something resembling a sequenced synthesizer will appear like a distant light on the horizon line, that you have to squint to see. So much of this work shares more in common with electricity rather than electronics, and shapes are implied or avoided, rather than drawn across a wall to observe and relate to.

It is the sincere hope of both Brian Grainger and Organic Industries that the public issuance of The Endless Sleep will bring some closure to the director of the original film, and that perhaps he will return to the idea once more, and these recordings may yet be given their purpose after all. Until then, what remains is here for you to mine and transcribe on your own terms.