Sleep Research Facility — Stealth

Through the decades, dark ambient has wallowed in the bleak, cold atmospheres of soulless space. From the Eraserhead soundtrack to Delerium’s early work on Dossier, from Nurse With Wound’s landmark Soliloquy for Lilith to Lustmord’s seminal The Place Where the Black Stars Hang, it has illustrated realms where all men are dead—or perhaps just folkloric figments of a distant, non-technological past.

Kevin Doherty’s Sleep Research Facility has out-bleaked them all with its fifth release, Stealth, much of which is based on field recordings taken from the hangar of a Northrop-Grumman B-2 Stealth Bomber at a U.S. Air Force base in Cambridgeshire, England. The title may just as well refer to the quiet effectiveness with which Doherty manages to infiltrate absolute blackness with an astonishing mix of beatless radiance and whispery, synthetic jibberish. He has written the soundtrack for spaghettification: a forceful, inescapable current that can rearrange molecules.

The 57-minute tour de force blends bass rumble, static, bleeps, the staccato chugs of a fan or an engine, and heavily processed radio transmissions into a concoction tinged with ominous retro-futurism; Ridley Scott’s Alien has long been a noted influence on Sleep Research Facility. Divided into five parts at roughly 10-12 minutes each, Stealth takes the overloaded minimal production detail of such computer-based genres as micro-house and assembles with clinical perfectionism an electronic train of thought, containing an entire sub-history that ruminates on the role of machines in warfare and human downfall. Such attention to detail ensures that Stealth never succumbs to the most common downfall of this genre, passiveness resulting in boredom. This is no mere drone sustained for minutes beyond its usefulness in an exercise to try the listener’s patience; this noise says something profound and discomforting, and uses every last second to get its point across.

Stealth is packaged with a second disc, Source, the “pre-mix” of field recordings and textures overseen by B.G. Nichols of FOURM and Si_COMM . By showcasing this raw bonus material, the homogeneity and seamlessness of Doherty’s masterful work is made more apparent, but it also goes against the manifesto of Sleep Research Facility: to be non-disruptive to sleep. While fascinating in its own right, Source lacks all the stealth of the main recording, and due to its harsh frequencies and sudden blasts of noise, this reviewer does not recommend drifting off to sleep while listening to it.