Have you ever been playing in the ocean, just being free and loosey-goosey, and all of a sudden you’re pummeled by a wave and held underwater on a rinse cycle long enough to where you can hear the sea creatures? Just long enough to feel a bit of fear and feel thankful when you make it back to the surface for some fresh air?

Or have you ever been in any body of water and tried to swim to the bottom and feel the pressure building around you the deeper you go? Most of us aren’t free divers and can’t understand the sensation of diving with no air tank hundreds of meters down. Listening to the sounds of water and its infinitely alien landscape. O Yuki Conjugate & Phillip Otterbach live in this territory, alien, pressure, deep - words all too familiar with the sort of diving they’ve gotten into here with this Sleep Machines album on Music For Memory.

The deep-sea dive O Yuki Conjugate & Phillip Otterbach take us on is filled with atmosphere and teaming with life. I wouldn’t call this as much of a tropical situation where everything is bright and the water is warm. This is cool temperate water, a sea forest, kelp beds, and big fish that aren’t bright and flashy, little clicky urchins tapping their thousand purple toes on the rocky bed. It’s subtle and moving slowly with confidence and astute observation to the rest of the life around them as they become immersed and lost among this world they’re creating and sharing with us.

This new album has a water spirit. It’s liquid, it flows, it can be destructive and chaotic and beautiful and all of those at the same time or on their own as individual threatening elements. There are tracks, but I don’t even want to split them up as singular talking points because it wouldn’t do this album justice. As the reality is, it is a conjuring of sonics. It’s better off just digested as Side A and Side B. Just take it all in. Two complete movements of fluid tension and release. A tidal meandering into both the darkness of the depths, but also an exploration of all the creatures we never even knew existed till we were given this new sonic world to explore.

In some ways, this fits in as a contemporary classical record, but mostly in no way is it at all like one. I don’t want to refer to it as ambient because to my ears, it really breaks free from those tropes with its movement and experimental meanderings, and at times, is menacing in such a beautiful way. It has tides, and they swell and cycle and swirl and dance with each other. The tracks blend seamlessly and are only separated in thought, not in form, and deserve to be together like lovers in a storm. I could probably tell you this was made with synthesizers and electronics and maybe samples and experimental percusions and whatever else, but while I listen to this album I don’t think about any of that. It just washes over me, I don’t need to think about those things.

By most accounts of logic, this hits a chord I find most impressive, it isn’t an easy listen for most reasonable people. But I’m not reasonable and appreciate the chaos and the visuality of this album as I watch the colors in my head turn to an emotional relation to the sounds of this world. I like to feel scared and out of place, in a world completely outside of myself because I know that after feeling something so intense comes beauty, and isn’t that a sweet reward, a gift, to know that things can always get better? There is always a bit of sunshine after the storm and sometimes the sun shines in the middle of it.

This album comes highly recommended for those wishing to explore new territory or listening experience, to take a journey into the depths of who knows where. Enjoy the ride. Put the album on and let it rip in order. Get lost. The journey is the experience. It’s an experience you’ll want to have.

'Sleep Machines' is available HERE on Bandcamp and is released on November 18th 2026.