I guess it’s safe to say that Liz Harris (Grouper, Nivhek) has become her own mini-genre, inspiring musicians to wash out as much as humanly possible via electronic processing that puts every sound source – especially vocals – through a dreamy, ethereal filter. Ekin Fil’s Sleepwalkers sure feels like one of these genealogical descendants, though radically different from its predecessors, it is not. Should it be? I will leave that question where it is and point out instead that music as intimate and personal as Harris’ naturally casts a shadow over other, deeply affected projects. 

Spread over five tracks, each over six minutes in length, Sleepwalkers moves within the horizon established by Siouxsie and the Banshees and later acts like Grouper and Tim Hecker, and struggles to measure any meaningful distance from it. 

The absence of rhythm or any syncopation is well-trodden territory, to say the least, and Ekin Fil is rather restrained about her vocal interjections, which never dominate the larger picture. On tracks like “Reflection”, her voice emerges slowly, as a kind of half-submerged siren song, more absence than presence. My hunch is that the lack of clarity, the feeling that all of this is buried somewhere beneath an ocean or a shipwreck, is likely the music’s appeal, a desire for sonic dedifferentiation in which the center is not a center but a vacuum, taking away as much as it might otherwise offer. The album’s final track, “Gone Gone”, makes this abundantly clear through its impulse to erase and reverse the march of linear time. The risk is, of course, that the journey is one more alienating than inviting, stuck in an expanded notion of the musical self as a ghost or haunted spirit – simultaneously everywhere and nowhere.

Fans of Grouper, Kranky records, and other ambient material with female vocals, may well find their way into Sleepwalkers, though these affinities might just as easily prejudice listeners against Ekin Fil. Either way, the non-threatening arm of the ambient machine is alive and well, for better or worse. For more