Leo Chadburn’s Sleep in the Shadow of the Alternator is a dream: a deep immersion in another world that is like and unlike our own, described through abandoned landscape, wrecked machines and lost purpose. The dream is here and now, a post-industrial Britain inspired by Chadburn’s East Midlands home town, marked by the closed power stations and coal mines, retreating back to the land and back to the future.
Chadburn is an acclaimed composer who has released several solo albums, including as Simon Bookish. Sleep… is powered by his narration, words murmured into a microphone like the latest of late night radio: the spirit of Chris Morris’ Blue Jam and Delia Derbyshire’s Inventions for Radio. Around his soft, insistent voice, layers of sound…