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Luka
Fisher
- Sleep Gallery MP3 EP 2015 | Silber 199 5 tracks, 5 minutes Sleep Gallery is five minutes of ambient, primitive dance music, & sound experiments that will suck you into Luka Fisher’s unique world on the second floor of a flower shop just off skid row in Los Angeles. : Press Release : Digital Booklet Interview in Amadeus Mag Track Listing: What Else Besides A Pleasure Heart Alters Your Surroundings As You Slip Away In The Sleep Gallery |
| Reviews: The 5in5 series, from Silber Records, has been one of our favorite musical adventures this year. With the series, Silber artists record an EP of 5 tracks that total about 5 minutes in length. The latest installment is the EP, Sleep Gallery, ambient goodness from Luka Fisher. Fisher is generally known for his visual art & music videos, so it's pretty cool to hear what he releases himself - a mix of ambient, experimental & primitive dance reminiscent of Psychic TV & Pigface. ~ Floorshime Zipper Boots Luka Fisher’s “Sleep Gallery” represents a pitch perfect take on vaporwave and hypnagogic pop. Throughout the collection the songs build off of each other creating lovely atmospheres that feel so delightfully comfortable and warm. Attention to detail is astounding as a great number of genres are covered over the duration of the collection from elements of pop, lo-fi, even metal at a few moments. Various elements at times recall the same lovely surrealism that graces “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”. By opting for such a wide range of details Luka Fisher is able to create a fully realized sound. The samples that adorn “What Else” sets the tone for what follows. Various layers of sound come together to create a kaleidoscopic mixture of colors. Nimble rhythms define the tender mood of “Besides A Pleasure Heart” whose sound at times recalls a post-rave environment as elements of club music float in and out of the mix. By far the highlight of the collection is the ethereal work of “Alters Yours Surroundings”. Over this piece everything is subdued as the glowing vocals serve front and center of the performance. Raging vocals appears out of the industrial churn of “As You Slip Away”. The balance between the soft and harsh elements works to the song’s strengths. Gentle drones conclude the collection with the heartfelt work of “In The Sleep Gallery”. “Sleep Gallery” is a smart, stylish collection, one that shows off Luka Fisher’s undeniably deft work. ~ Beach Sloth Los Angeles-based ambient musician Luka Fisher and the team released their experimental collection: Sleep Gallery (2015) courtesy of Silber Records. They describe their sound as “ambient, primitive dance music and sound experiments” – all packed into five minutes. Silber Records has been championing multiple indie acts and one of their later acts is this mystifying collection. It doesn’t take long for the listener to realize that Fisher’s album has the same spaced-out, stock sound intertwined audio collage that you could expect to hear from bands like Skinny Puppy, albeit much more toned down. The best track, at least that I’ve found, was with “As You Slip Away”, sporting an enticingly creepy riff that’s over before you can even get a full sense of it, much like the rest of the album. It’s a quick one-two punch of an album, but I think that’s what makes the audience crave more. ~ Stephanie Hughes, Razmataz Dreamy found sound/noise collages with a nice tactile feel. Each of these five tracks is about a minute long and features what seems to be a mix of altered tapes and live vocals. It sounds like the type of soundscape that an arty post-hardcore band would play while tuning, but stands up well on its own. I actually wish each track was longer, to give me more time to immerse myself in it and really start to dream. ~ Chris Terry, Razorcake Sleep Gallery is included in Silber Records Five in Five series, in which selected artists release five songs in five-minute EPs that explore sonic territory or approaches that they may not have freedom to do in longer releases. For Luka Fisher’s contributions, the L.A. artist exercises his musical demons through a variety of voices, including warbled, sustain synth bleeds, sample-heavy collage tracks and at least one track with tortured death metal grunts over a skittering drum machine and beautiful synth drones. Five minutes well spent. ~ Ryan Hall, Slug Mag Crossing the boundaries between ‘creating art’ and ‘living art’ often involves stepping between the confines of formats and channels for artistic expression. A successful transition can yield the most intriguing results, transforming the artist himself into an idea, a unifying concept for all his work, which, in turn, becomes akin to an instinct, a compulsion, a chaos-born Nietzschean dancing star. Enter Luka Fisher—a contemporary artist, writer, musician, producer, music video director, activist, translator, and passionate partaker in Los Angeles’s artist circles. Creating at the crossroads of genres and media and constant interaction with the art milieu has earned him an A&R-position at the idiosyncratic Records AD Nauseam. Sleep Gallery is the next step in artistic progression, representing Fisher’s official debut in a musician’s guise. Released by Silber Records as an entry into its 5in5 EP-series (a ‘five songs in five minutes’ concept, aiming to grant full artistic freedom, as well as exploring creative potential of imposing limits), this short yet intriguing set of sonic collages serves the simple purpose of releasing Fisher’s art ‘out into the world’ and letting it tell its own story. Being first and foremost an artist, Fisher applies techniques and approaches familiar to him from other media to his own music. It becomes apparent as a collage compiled of various audio sources introduces the record. We hear a brief ambient piano melody gradually shedding its soothing qualities while being played on repeat and furthermore turning into something quite unsettling through the addition of processing and treatment by scratching and squeaking noises. There is a great deal of nuance present, and while the whole album sounds entirely strange, nothing seems out-of-place. This unique gathering of sound effectively serves as a backdrop for the dialogue-resembling structure lovingly assembled out of various spoken samples by means of a cut-up technique. Hypnotically uttered, ‘you love art, you live art, you are art, you do art’ slips perfectly into the record’s context, summarizing what Fisher is all about in one concise axiom. The inclusion of field recordings and other general samples elaborates on the environment in which Fisher lives and creates, augmenting the sense of immediacy present throughout the whole album. The second track displays fuzzy, swaying guitars that are accompanied by a collage of incomprehensible chatter and reverb-drenched moans, driven forth to its culmination by a rigid clanging beat. Unexpectedly, the intensity gives way to gentle female vocalisations which are carried by a subtle ambient background. But even this seemingly guileless piece offers a few quirks; the details of the background unfold after a number of listens. An ever-present sense of something being ‘off’ certainly plays in the record’s favour. Sometimes it only lingers amongst the tracks’ multiple layers, whilst other times it aims to catch listeners off-guard. The gritty atmosphere of the fourth track is a perfect example: A drastic departure from the previous track’s laid-back ambience, it brings forth a mixture of noise, weird guitar effects, and amp feedback, further intensified by half-whispered, half-screamed vocals. ‘There’s an end to everything’—a distant voice announces the record’s final act. A distorted synth melody keeps on wandering behind the veils of gentle droning until it reaches its hasty end, effectively signalled by the click of a stop-button of some recording device. A man of many faces, Luka Fisher is also a collage himself, comprised of many people he has collaborated with and learned from in order to expand and excel his expression. Containing a lengthy list of guest performers, the five-minute long Sleep Gallery is the result of a prolific joint effort between many individuals. With its unpredictable nature and diversity of sonic input, the record exists ‘in the moment’, while short spinning time further contributes to the sense of creative urgency. Records Ad Nauseam’s press release calls these tracks, ‘sound experiments’, rather aptly, as they show the signs of what might develop into something more, yet offering enough to represent the versatility of Fisher’s work (and pique the interest of those unfamiliar with it). So what is Sleep Gallery? Like any art piece, the story within is equal parts fiction, reality, and mystery. An observant eye might notice that all track titles combined give us a clue from Fisher himself: ‘What else besides a pleasure heart alters your surroundings as you slip away in the Sleep Gallery’. Undoubtedly an invitation for a variety of interpretations, yet one can speculate if this statement provides a glimpse of the intentions behind this creative output—an impulse-driven escape, a display of means for transformation, and a process of personal liberation. Sleep Gallery is a short five-minutes-long escape, a crack in a wall to peek into the crowded workspace of a busy occupant. Keeping in mind Fisher’s previous involvement with video directing, this EP can be seen as a short sonic documentary, delving into the everyday life and musings of a person that lives and breathes his art. Strange, perplexing, even devoid of meaning to some ears, Sleep Gallery stands as an honest display of raw artistic work perfected through collaboration. ~ Dennis Gudim, Heathen Harvest Luka Fisher is a US primitive-drone creator and better known as a video and visual art creator. As part of the Silber Records five in five series Luka released his début EP Sleep Gallery (which is available on bandcamp). For those not of longer stay, Silber Records is a label who feature regularly and the five in five series are five track EPs forming five minutes of music, split between tracks as the creator deems appropriate and demanding the musician pare everything to basics to fit the exacting running time of the release. The fourth of the five tracks is As You Slip Away – a piece resonating of the wildest nightmares. ~ Tim Whale, Emerging Indie Bands |
