YELLOW SPHERE

Sleeping Pandora is the name of the project of multi instrumentalist Mathias Rosmann, who is the sole contributor to this Psychedelic/Space Rock band. The project was founded in Berlin in 2017 and 'Yellow Sphere', released in early 2019 is the fourth album from this project. There are only 3 tracks on this album, but they are quite long and meditative tracks.

The album starts with the 22 minute trance and psychedelic epic 'Santenna'. The jam comes from a few guitars which consists of a lot of echoing and delayed layers over a repeating background of a riff and some percussion. After 6 minutes, the percussion drops out leaving just the chiming and echoing guitars. A new subdued rhythm line comes in a bit later, and a few minutes after that, drums suddenly come to the foreground from out of the haze to add to the continuing psychedelic groove and improvisations. After 15 minutes, the drums stop and the guitar layers continue alone. Drums come back at 17 minutes with percussive guitar notes and effects. Though it is long without much in the way of dynamic or tempo change, it is still a nice bit of psychedelia that is good for a long meditation and pleasant effects. It is far too long for just listening to however.

'Cold Fever' is about half of the size as the last track at 12 minutes. After the long psychedelic track, it is surprising to hear something more upbeat like this. The guitar line is more melodic that the last meandering track and there is quite a bit of synth and electronic patterns going on in the background, almost giving it an electronic edge. But the guitar has the main spotlight doing the improv. Being less psychedelic, this one is more like Space Rock with a much more interesting and dynamic background that moves through a changing chord pattern that repeats. The drums drop out around the 8 minute mark but synths and guitar continue. After 10 minutes, the beat comes back.

Finally, 'Frozen' (nothing to do with the Disney movie) ends the album with an 11 minute track. Subdued synths and percussion start a processed looped sequence while an acoustic / electric guitar improvises over it all. Around the 5 minute mark, there is a strange, looped and vocalized effect that comes in for a little while. While the synths anchor psychedelic effects from the guitar. Around 9 minutes, the guitars intensify a little, but it all stays quite trance-like.

This album is a good meditation style psychedelic album with long improvised tracks played against mostly looped backgrounds. The tracks meander on without much change in rhythm and basic sound. As far as listening to them for the sake of listening, they can be hard to sit through and work best as background music, or 'free floating'. The music isn't really dark, but there isn't much melodically that goes on here. The upbeat 2nd track is a nice change, but again, it is long without much change, like the other tracks. The music is good, but not very interesting for a lot of listenings.