145. Sleep
The Forum
6 July 2016
It takes a certain type of band to walk onstage, play one song for over an hour, and leave the crowd howling like they’ve seen the face of god. That band is Sleep. And the song? Dopesmoker, obviously.
This wasn’t so much a gig as a cosmic endurance ritual, disguised as a doom metal show in north London. The audience looked like they’d either just emerged from a Black Sabbath convention or were halfway through building a trebuchet in their garage. The smell in the crowd was herbal. Very herbal. There were people vibrating.
As the opening chord rumbled out, somewhere between a detuned jet engine and the bowel movement of the universe, you could feel a collective bracing. Here we go. And go we did, 63 minutes of glacial riffs, biblical reverb, and notes stretched longer than most marriages.
Matt Pike wanders out, looking a bit like a Norse god who’s had a bad few years, and launched into the riff like it was his only means of communication. Al Cisneros, high priest of the low end, stood centre-stage using his bass to summon the void, looking like stoner-Gandalf, while Jason Roeder beat his drums with the measured intensity of someone forging a sword for a very, very slow apocalypse.
To the uninitiated, Dopesmoker is an album and is basically one riff, repeated and mutated and worshipped until it becomes less a piece of music and more a religion. And tonight, The Forum is the temple. The amps are stacked like pagan idols. The lights are minimal. The atmosphere is somewhere between doom cult and ritual sacrifice, except the only thing getting sacrificed is your sense of time and space.
A bloke next to me hasn’t moved in 40 minutes and may have astrally projected himself somewhere. Another is crying. A third appears to be performing gentle Tai Chi. I stop trying to make sense of it.
Then, just when you’ve accepted you might live here forever, it ends. No encore. No banter. Just stunned silence, ringing ears, and the realisation you’ve spent your evening being slowly crushed by a soundwave.