Arms and Sleepers - Corpus Dei (2020)

Arms and Sleepers continue their journey through a turbulent 2020 with the 5th installment in their 6-part music series being released this year. The new full-length album, titled CORPUS DEI, will be out on Dec. 4 via Future Archive Recordings.

Arms and Sleepers is the electronic music duo Max Lewis and Mirza Ramic. Formed in Boston, USA in 2006, the group has amassed over 30 releases, nearly 2,000 live performances, and countless TV and Film music placements in their 15-year history. 2020 has been the group’s busiest year yet, and the upcoming new album CORPUS DEI looks to add another signature stamp in Arms and Sleepers’ diverse music catalog.

Written and produced throughout 2020 – while on US and European tours, unplanned quarantine in Latvia, and settling into a new home in Berlin – CORPUS DEI is a surreal musical journey that feels both free-spirited and highly tense. It is the culmination of a fragile, uncertain and difficult year, and a closing statement on an ambitious, multi-release conceptual project. CORPUS DEI is Arms and Sleepers’ fourth full-length album released in 2020 alone, which also saw the release of several EPs, standalone singles, and remixes. Each release has revolved around the idea of “self-destruction”, an eerily relevant topic that was conceived well before the pandemic-stricken year. Writes Ramic: “I started planning for this 6-part music release in 2019 as a way of dealing with and processing my own increasing existential obsession with mortality, meaning, and ultimate absurdity of life. I wanted each release to capture some broader, objective elements of human life as well as some more personal, subjective experiences. Little did I know that I would end up living in isolation in Latvia for nearly 4 months earlier this year. It was an incredibly bizarre period of my life, as it was—and continues to be—for much of the world.”

CORPUS DEI combines the varied sounds of Arms and Sleepers’ recent releases, merging elements of instrumental hip-hop, IDM, electronica, downtempo, and ambient music. The intricately textured beats and densely layered synths form a sonic palette that should be familiar to fans of Arms and Sleepers, but the static-induced, noisy and unsettling atmosphere of the album as a whole adds a new dimension to the group’s catalog. Experimenting more closely with sound design and focusing on the overall compositional flow, Arms and Sleepers manages to create a record that seems to—for better or for worse—capture the dreadful emotional weight of 2020. Writes Ramic: “The various song ideas for CORPUS DEI were written throughout 2020 in what seem like impossibly different contexts: a few days off on tour in Augusta, Georgia in warm southern weather in mid-February; a tiny hotel room in Odessa, Ukraine on the first day of a European tour; a strange 4 months in Riga, Latvia while stranded there in the midst of a pandemic; and a rejuvenating new chapter of my life in Berlin, Germany despite the continued uncertainty about the pandemic. This album feels like a collection of estranged fragments of my life this year – a year that has felt like an eternity.”