Featured Artist Sleep : Oldominion

Sleep started out rhyming at the age of 9 in New Mexico with crewmate Onry Ozzborn in local showcases and on street corners. A move in 1990 brought Sleep to the Pacific Northwest where he met Pale Soul and began performing with him around the region. Later, Sleep would go on to being a founding member of the groundbreaking Northwest Hip Hop crew Oldominion… That’s the past; this is the present.

"I've probably been inspired by every artist at least once positively or negatively..." Sighting influences such as Black Sheep, Hieroglyphics and Rakim seem like mandatory answers for many emcees, Sleep is sure to include timeless songwriters such as The Beatles and Paul Simon on his list of inspiring artists as well. "We, (Chicharones) don't want to be the lyrical miracle emcees or anything, we just want to make good songs." The importance of songwriting to Sleep is apparent when listening to Sleep's upcoming sophomore release "Christopher" due out May 31st on Up Above Records best known for their involvement with the Visionaries crew but more recently Jurassic 5, Living Legends and others.

The sound on “Christopher” is a tightly knit collection of songs with a very different approach from his critically acclaimed debut release "Riot by Candlelight" released on Under the Needle in 2002. "Christopher" tells stories, penned straight from Sleep's own experiences using his signature rapid-fire cadences over polished production choices from Vitamin D, Maker, Pale Soul, Smoke and others. Where "Riot" was a darker project whose composition was void of form, Christopher's sound is more along the lines of his "Chicharones" side project than his earlier Oldominion works. In his words, "There are some big differences between riot and Christopher. Riot was an experimental project for me. I wrote it under the premise that it would have no definitive structure. It dealt with the darker side of my art hence the name “Riot by Candlelight”.

I wrote the whole record to have a personal meaning to me that only I'd know... It has three little layers to it. It was structured to have non-structure. Chistopher is a more structured record and is mostly about the last two years of my life and also my past, it's kind of an autobiography album. I created it to sound nice to the ear, something that you wouldn't have to work on to like. I think that if you came to a sleep show and liked what you saw then Christopher won't disappoint you as where riot by candlelight might throw you off a little bit... With the new Chicharones album and the Christopher album I feel I have two really good albums that I'm really proud of. I never really expected Riot by Candlelight to come out. I was just making the album. Anticon was interested in it, I kind of wrote it with that in mind. I didn't know if they wanted to do it or not, I didn't know if I wanted to do it or not. I just didn't know. I was just making a whole bunch of songs."

We ended up having a lot of fun and a lot of chemistry together. We did "Opposite of Fair" and I thought it was different than anything I'd ever done before. I liked the way our voices sounded together and I thought if we developed on it, we could really harmonize. He ended coming down another week and we pounded out the Boss Hoggs record on a 16 track in my room...We just really get along together good as humans. We'll bounce ideas off each other and have different qualities for making good songs. We have the same vision…to make good songs. We're working on our new record right now, we haven't named it or anything but it's almost done. We focused on just making songs. We did a lot of singing on this record. It's fun to be dorky together. I couldn't do it without Josh. He brought out that side of me. In nature, I'm just a dorky, mellow human being, kind of goofy, kind of incoherent or that's what it seems like sometimes. That's why they call me Sleep."