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BACK
 SLEEPLESS
– Blown By the Winds of Success
By Adrian ‘The Energizer’ Bromley
NET-only
Maor Appelbaum, who makes up half of the brilliant Israeli duo Sleepless
(along with David Bendayan), is one of those individuals that you
meet in life that you can tell right away that they are hard workers.
The band’s debut disc Winds Blow Higher (on The End
Records) is a testimonial to years of hard work and sacrifice.
Appelbaum explains the struggle and years of work behind getting
their debut out for the music community to digest.
"When we started to work on Sleepless, we wanted to do something
different from what was out there in the music scene—something
that had dark elements, progressive elements, psychedelic elements
and so on, to just have a good fusion of sounds. We didn’t
really plan out how things were going to end up. All of the music
is improvised."
Improvised? Really?
"Yeah," he continues. "Everything was improvised.
We recorded a demo of four tracks and those tracks were used for
the album. Some of the bass sounds on those tracks sounded really
weird, as if they were electric and acoustic guitars. We then used
those tracks as they were because they had a really unique sound
that we liked, even though we had used really bad equipment to record
the original demo. This was all done from a home studio. The planning
was to do something that came from within us as the recording went
along. It just came to us as we recorded the original material.
"The material was recorded a long time ago on bad equipment
so we spent time over the last few years trying to make it sound
good. A lot of mixes, fixing stuff up and some sound engineering
stuff," he reveals. "The music came together really fast,
but it took two years to get a demo out and two more years to get
the debut album out. Needless to say, it has been a lot of hard
work for both of us in Sleepless." <br><br>
And while the duo spent a lot of hard work in the studio trying
to get the right sound for Sleepless, once the demo had been completed,
the two made a strong surge to get the name of the band (and its
material) out to the music community.
"We did a lot of promotion for the demo. I’d work till
11 p.m. at night and come home and work till 4 a.m. on contacting
magazines and radio stations in the United States and parts of Europe
and the rest of the world. We got tons of great reviews and some
great coverage. The reason we got so much exposure is ’cause
of the hard work. It may take time to see things through, but it
does pay off."
Was it hard to get noticed and signed to a label? What was that
experience like?
Says Appelbaum, "Raven Music [the label they are signed to
back home] has known about Sleepless from the beginning, but each
label likes to see a band really establish themselves before they
get signed. They really liked us and wanted to see how things would
end up after time went on. We sent like 200 demos to many labels
outside of Israel and all of them would say that they loved the
music but can’t put it out because they didn’t want to
take the risk of putting something like Sleepless out. Now that
we are signed and people are taking notice, all of these labels
want to work with us. The good thing is that over the years of us
working, Raven Music has worked hard to put out good music and grow
as a label and as a distributor."
He adds, "Raven saw that we were working hard on the album
and they liked what they heard, so they signed us. We both grew
up over the years, and the time was right.
"Sleepless was never meant to be an aggressive band,"
answers Appelbaum when asked about the soothing sounds of his band.
"I mean, we do have aggressive parts in our music but those
are only small parts that act as peaks of the music. Even though
we live in an area of the world that is plagued by problems, we
have kept the sounds of Sleepless non-aggressive. We live these
problems day by day, and those problems go into our subconscious.
You can hear it in our music. Not in terms of aggression, but more
in sadness, melancholy or depression. We are not a political band.
We just like to get a lot out of our music, however that may come."
While the influences for Sleepless—dark ambient, gothic, progressive
and even slight doses of jazz music—can be heard as the music
unfolds, it is quite hard to pick out just what genre they would
fit into. Can’t be done, I say. Appelbaum agrees.
"Because this was a project when it started off, myself coming
from one band and David from another, we were excited about the
freedom of what this band offered to us. We didn’t really get
influenced by many bands musically, rather we were influenced by
numerous bands and their urges to create and evolve their sounds.
I respect a lot of bands out there even if I don’t like their
music.
"I respect them because I like how they got their sound or
how they deliver the product," Appelbaum finishes off. "Those
bands give me the motivation to do this, and from that point on
it is up to us both to see where we take the music of Sleepless."
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