Year: 2026
Label: Zoharum
If you’ve ever lain awake at night, you probably know the feeling of time stretching out into infinity, space slowly collapsing into a single point and consciousness being reduced to nothing but the awareness of awareness itself – the awareness that you’re not asleep.
It’s an excruciating and painful feeling. And something that Sutcliffe Jugend/Sutcliffe No More member Kevin Tomkins manages to capture admirably on his latest solo outing, the drone/dark ambient album Insomnia.
Stretching over two CD’s and running for almost two hours, Insomnia is a masterful excercise in repetition, variation and mobile immobility. The majority of the eleven tracks consists of largely the same base elements: long drawn-out drones, a subtle organ playing extended notes and what at their most musical become vague pseudo-melodies. Nowhere during the considerable duration of the album does repetition result in tedium, though.
At first sight, much of Insomnia may seem like it merely repeats the same pattern over and over again. However, over time, the listener realizes that each track genuinely is different underneath the surface. Like during those nights when you’re unable to fall asleep and you stare at the ceiling, and you start to make out details and find patterns, over time Insomnia’s lengthy ambient compositions reveal surprising amounts of nuance and details. Insomnia is not minimalist music; in the context of (dark) ambient, quite the contrary in fact. This is surprisingly fleshed-out and arranged music. There are also plenty of overt, surface-level details separating tracks from each other than one will readily discern when one overcomes the length of the album and start to assimilate the whole..
The compositions are also constantly shifting, moving in subtle ways. Again, I draw a parallel to the theme of the album: if you’re ever lain awake at night, in the dark things will eventually appear to move. That half glimpsed shape will appear to shift positions, the walls will move in a little closer. But of course, in reality, they don’t. In a very similar manner, Tomkins’ compositions paradoxically appear to be in slow but constant motion, but still end up very much like they started.
Insomnia is an impressively atmospheric album. It manages to capture not only the oppressive sensation of insomnia, but also that mystical and undeniable beauty of the immobile silence of night. That weird sensation of otherness that almost feels like falling into some shadow world that is frozen in time. In Insomnia’s dark, brooding, somber layers of slowly shifting, modulating, changing and droning sound lies this paradox of frustration and beauty.
Insomnia also subtly builds tension throughout the album. Towards the end of the latter disc, the compositions slowly become more taut, like a string being pulled or tightened. And then, finally, during the last two tracks, release. Insomnia: Night IX (Sleep Apnea) with its free jazz style horns is a subtle culmination of despair and disarray, leading into Insomnia: Night X which, with its distorted and crackling layers of noisy sound, feels like pushing through a wall of pain. These lead into the conclusion: Insomnia: Night XI (And Then A Darkness Filled The Whole Of The Eye) almost serenely offers completion, serenely at first. Ultimately it, too, swells up to disturbing distortion towards the end; perhaps the blissful white noise of consciousness giving in – to sleep, perchance to dream!
Insomnia is a journey which, despite being inspired by a debilitating condition and exploring pain as much and even more than beauty, is potently captivating. It is replete with the mysterious allure of the small hours of morning, with the strange alienation of being a solitary waking soul in a world asleep, and as such manages to wring from its less-than-joyous subject matter an essence of somber beauty. To put it banally, Insomnia is an album not to be missed.
Kevin Tomkins doesn’t seem to have an online presence.
