Where once existed a blank canvas, the artist projects meaning. Traditionally, this meaning always set out towards a single goal: the capture of the sublime*. Like a cryptid that avoids all photography, the sublime refuses to assume a form crafted by human hands. Eventually, modern art emerged, scrapping the project of channeling the divine, opting instead to cynically poke fun at the notion that human hands may ever realize the sublime. However, can we be absolutely sure that no human work has ever even contained a glimmer of the animating breath that God thrust into the Garden of Eden? Surely, out of the billions of pieces of art created by human hands, many of which have since been lost to history forever, at least a handful of these photographed the illusive yeti, if even by accident, right?
On a courageous mission to answer this formidable question, Asleep Country scours the internet for shards of human creativity, reassembling these bones into never-before-seen fossilized skeletons. Chaos inevitably ensues, but occasional moments of impressive order and striking beauty appear throughout the three hour composition. In these moments, the listener wonders whether humanity gave up too early on its ambitions to capture lightning in a bottle; perhaps we just haven’t put our sounds together in the most unexpectedly gorgeous ways.
As society engages in cautious debate regarding diversity, Asleep Country slams open the door and throws Fake Opulent on the table. Where fusion music welds multiple cultures together into a new, often unrecognizable form, sound collages such as Fake Opulent leave all original musical traditions in their fully in-tact condition. Rather than forcing disjunct channels of creativity into a single faucet, Asleep Country invites each sample into a musical no-man’s-land, where the pieces receive permission to mix, mingle, fight, and unite. Today’s youth see the pursuit of the artistic sublime as the ultimate joke, but perhaps the key to solving this foundational human puzzle lies directly in front of our faces: diversity, conversation, synthesis.
*For those unfamiliar with philosophical sublimity, the term may seem like an overly broad catch-all. In reality, the sublime refers to an extremely specific divine order of the universe, one that humans briefly expose themselves to when exploring nature. For instance, the powers of the universe come alive when one gazes upon the Grand Canyon, and for a moment the jagged movements of time just make sense. This order, theoretically the most beautiful and intellectually advanced concept in existence, has so far failed to appear in its complete form in any piece of art, despite millennia of human attempts.