Once upon a time there was Peter A. Bruce aka Sleeping Thunder a NH based artist inspired by hikes, kayaking, and Native American things. Peter had released a host of New Age and World Music-type albums, including the 16-track “Off the Map”, using woodwinds, keyboard, percussion, and real nature sounds to create his blend of ambient soundscapes.
Today Peter A. Bruce is still around doing his thing, but Sleeping Thunder on his new album, “Across The Tracks”, scheduled for release October 15, is now exploring the City. So rather than the usual birds, frogs, and brook sounds, there’s a leaking steam pipe, and banging on traffic cones, trash cans, the bus-stop bench, etc. – plus some guitar, and some techno.
By this time you would have gathered that listening to Sleeping Thunder’s music is a diverse listening experience compared to conventional pop or even ambient music. Peter seems to want his music to be as much a continuous condition of the environment, in the same way as a painting is.
This goes a long way toward explaining Sleeping Thunder’s approach to music, where tone and texture take precedence over lyrics and melody. These are not so much songs as they are ambient sound paintings. Even on songs like “(Lost, in) The Shuffle” and “Grump”, which seems to follow a conventional song structure, there are strange textures to distract from the melody.
Even on the one song where Sleeping Thunder’s includes lyrics, they seem to be there not so much for meaning, but for the images they conjure. Several tracks are slightly over the two-minute mark, while most borders on three, the longest track is just barely over 4 minutes, which says a lot considering that instrumental music tends to last a whole lot longer, if not well over their welcome.
Peter A. Bruce aka Sleeping Thunder, of course, is simultaneously a composer and experimenter with sound, and a commentator on life – and sometimes not always in that order. That sort of description would ring pretentious with anyone else, but Sleeping Thunder has just been himself, an artist using technology and music in a different way.
Obviously what he creates will most likely not be appreciated by the conventional music conformists, or by the masses of current electronic ambient sound lovers. For the former group the equation is easy to understand whereas for the latter, it may be that Sleeping Thunder is still rooted in what sounds like the retro sounds of true-blue midi, as opposed to the new array of shiny technological loops and samples.
“Across The Tracks”, is a product of Sleeping Thunder’s new city mindset, a recording both magical (“Pussyfoot / On Borrowed Time”) and yet at times disturbing (“Well I Tried”, “Badumbum”) – the parallelism with real city life, therefore is appropriate.
This seems to have been Sleeping Thunder’s intent, to offer us fragments of city images painted in sound instead of watercolors – images that have begun long before we hear them coming through the speakers, and could go on indefinitely after the music fades out – probably forever.
OFFICIAL LINKS: GOOGLE PLAY – YOUTUBE
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