https://thesems.bandcamp.com/album/sleepless
Genre: Ambient
Rating: 4/5
released on bandcamp March 4, 2022
Sleepless, instead of being about sleep – a foundational theme for a lot of ambient music-, is about, as the name implies, insomnia. And honestly, insomnia is the real issue, isn’t it? If we were sleeping there wouldn’t be any reason to worry about the music. Recently, somewhat to my dismay, my Ambien has been discontinued. It worked well for me but maybe it’s for the best. Insomnia has been an aggressive foe of mine. Trying to do what needs to be done in order to survive when 3:00 AM can’t be differentiated from 3:00 PM is hard. Recently, I’ve had the luxury of sleeping when it suits me so it’s not as much of an issue but there’s still the pesky little problem of nodding off a lot and needing five cups of coffee to stay awake at all but then never being able to sleep more than an hour or two at a time. Then once every ten days or so sleeping for twenty out of the twenty-four hours two days in a row. With the right ambient sounds on my blue tooth speaker of course.
This music cradles the edge between ambient and new age quite well. L&L doesn’t simply rely on swelling waves of sound but rather adds simple floating melodies to follow. The melodic structure is what I associate more with new age. The middle ground here is closer to what typically comes up on “spa” related music. The music that lands in that sort of niche runs from mediocre to very good and even the mediocre stuff is pretty good because it’s standing on a solid conceptual foundation. This release is the very good class. The secret sauce is in the aforementioned melodic structure. Put simply, Peter Bogolub is a good composer.
Warmth Highest 