Interview with The Sleep Dealers

I’m not going to lie, there was something about this interview that I found really beautiful. The Sleep Dealers and their music already struck me as extremely beautiful on their own, but I never really stopped to think about just how sappy they were while listening to them.

As you grow older, making friends and forming experiences outside of work or school becomes harder. I don’t know how much right I have to say that at 22 years old, though if it means anything, as I’m writing this, there are four hours left before I turn 23. Maybe sappiness is an exercise I should’ve practiced more often six years ago, at 17, the age Richard Nixon Tickle Torture is now (great name, I know). A project that celebrates that moment in life where you genuinely feel like your friends would carry you to the end of the line if you fell, and that together you could defeat all the evil in the world, feels necessary. Sometimes it’s hard to believe in that feeling, but it’s human to chase it, to keep wanting to meet people and love them.

I don’t really have much else to say other than that you should obviously listen to these guys, especially Against The Howling Winds, if you feel like you need to reconnect with that feeling in your life. And yeah, this whole text is probably super anti-journalistic or whatever, but if nobody reads anything anymore anyway, then who cares? I can say whatever the hell I want. I want to believe that what we do and the time we spend on it is also art, even if you could argue otherwise, I’m deciding that it is.

Let’s try to be more sappy.

Junk Dealers: Hi, thanks for being here, could you introduce yourselves and talk about your other personal projects? You can also talk about how you are doing and whatever thing you are doing aside from art!

RNTT: Yo, what’s good. Music game Kai Sotto here.

Volovec: Hi. I'm doing great. I also do solo stuff. Check out Varjevork.

Monomatism: Thanks for having us. Aside from The Dealers I’ve been making my own (mostly shite) music for almost 4 years now. Whenever I’m not working on music I’m usually listening to music or watching movies.

departure: peace, this is departure. aka the rap game David Foster Wallace. been doing as good as i can be. I have a lot of stuff going on on the side besides the Sleep Dealers, including a solo rap career on top of being involved with the East Coast-based I’ll Never Die hip hop collective.

Linsdey: Thank you for having us. I make solo music as The Lampreys and work at a Pharmacy.

Rescue Dawn: What's good it’s the one and only Rescue Dawn aka DS aka Danilo Serbia. I sometimes make solo music also under Rescue Dawn.

Noah: My name is Noah I make music and video games.

mmryxloss: My name is Hollis, a.k.a. Mmryxloss, a.k.a. Lynchian Marx, and I am a singer/producer for TSD and currently in the process of finishing my second LP. I make psych-folk adjacent music but also make experimental trap and electronic music about love and socialism.

RNTT: Thank you so much for having us, Go Dubs!

JD: I suppose most of you met through the internet, how did it happen?

RNTT: In a myriad of ways. I met the original big three (Rescue Dawn, me, Noah) through Musictok, then met the others through a bunch of other origins, which will be explained below.

Rescue Dawn: Referring to what RNTT said, we met through a musictok discord server and I posted my music on it and he checked it out then said “this kid has potential” then the rest is history. Everyone else in the group I’ve met through RNTT besides Noah.

mmryxloss: I was one of the more recent members of TSD, joining around late 24-early 25? Something like that. However, I’ve known and worked with RNTT, Rescue Dawn, and other mutuals and associates for a couple years before the inception of TSD. I would agree with the fact that discord and tiktok certainly was the source for organisation regarding groups and music projects. I still remember back in the day there was a server we were all in called meowcord and we produced an awful compilation of tracks and released it on BandCamp (my track was pretty good tho…).

Volovec: In the early days RNTT messaged me through the RYM inbox asking to collaborate for a split. Kept in touch and then a few months later I would collaborate with the dealers on our 2nd before officially joining after the release of that.

Monomatism: Me and RNTT first crossed paths in a Discord server before the release of Iniibig Kita and much of the solo Tickle Torture work, and due to personal issues I basically ignored him for the better part of a year. After the release of iniibig kita though I realized the guy was actually quite serious about music, and we got back in touch just in time for me to work on the second album.

departure: i met the guys through a combination of mutual artist friends, this was around the time foxxmonger was still in the group. i dropped VVS in early 2024 and linked with lua trilogy to have her do her remix for “Kiss Me”, and i was starting to get affiliated with the original Zest Fest. so i met RNTT some time around then and he expressed his fondness for VVS and said that it had actually influenced the group to make their first record Inibiig Kita with Boxelder. i stayed affiliated and around the way going into Peoples, Places and Things and around when we actually first started recording Against The Howling Winds was when i started having a consistent relationship. originally i was just tasked to engineer the whole record, and then RNTT asked me to join as a resident engineer/producer for the whole group. and that’s how i got here.

Linsdey: I found out about the group through Rateyourmusic esoteric charts a few years back. RNTT asked me over discord to join (or maybe I asked, I can't recall). I feel like I’m hesitant to intervene with younger people making important art sometimes. There is obviously some kind of magical intangible vibe going on with the group that I’m still not certain I totally understand. I joined because I wanted to help the vision come to life.

JD: We've talked previous to this interview about your name and how 'Sleep Dealer' by Oneohtrix Point Never also had something to do with Dealers Of God's name too. How did you come to a consensus with the name?

RNTT: Honestly? The real story of the name is definitely muddied because I had literally texted Noah about it 30 seconds after coming up with it, but when I used to make solo music, it was like these multiple song long collages that I would find the material with using the RateYourMusic database, usually of sappy romantic love songs from all over the place from “I Love How You Love Me” by The Paris Sisters to the Tatsuro Yamashita cover of Plastic Love off “JOY” ironically, while looking for samples, I recall directly using the esoteric charts and landing upon the Sleep Dealer single at a 4.22 if I believe. I think that’s what led to me conjuring up the name. Finding consensus was incredibly easy around the time though, given it was me, Rescue Dawn, and Noah and we honestly were not taking it a quarter as seriously as we do now. If you want a TL;DR, it’s our process and influence accidentally distilled.

Noah: Richard told me and I was like that goes hard.

RNTT: Type shit.

Monomatism: W Noah.

Rescue Dawn: Like Noah said, it’s aura.

mmryxloss: s/o Lopatin, he tha goat.

JD: Why do you think sound collage has had this huge growth in interest these last few years? Do you have a personal reason for why you enjoy (or maybe not, you never know) doing it?

RNTT: I think Sound Collage is becoming more mainstream as a lot of recontextualization of culture is re-emerging in the zeitgeist of what trends. You scroll on TikTok you hear jerk or hoodtrap remixes of Poison by Bell Biv DeVoe, or some wannabe Anthony Fantano calling Everywhere at the End of Time the “darkest album he ever experienced” more than ever, a world with nothing to do wants to go back to a time where we had something to do. I personally enjoy Sound Collage and making Sound Collage because I get to look at what I have experienced personally and think.. “How can I recontextualize this?” and suddenly all these things from a collaged sample of a YouTube short of Moon River, to Jamie Foxx singing “Light A Candle” and a video of chimes, all makes a portrait of the hue of the eyes of someone I used to love.

Rescue Dawn: Honestly at first when RNTT told me what type of music he wants to make (aka sound collage) for our first collab, I thought this was sorta ridiculous but it’s been 3 years since then and I honestly just see how beautiful and meaningful it is taking these different samples, dialogues, short spoken word samples and sound effects and just put them all into one to make a brand new song that’s so one of a kind.

mmryxloss: Sound Collage isn’t something that’s entirely new. This style of music has been passed down from the philosophies of Schaffer, Ferrari, Oswald, and DJ Shadow. Merging sound objects from samples or non-musical excerpts has been transcended to integrate culture and aesthetic like no other fusion has been able to do. The internet certainly has a role in that, most of us come from different backgrounds and cultures and it makes sense for us to integrate our skills and understandings of music into something more than us as individuals. TSD represents something more than just a music group, but that our collaboration of spirituality, philosophy, love, and musical talents is key to our sustenance as artists and allow us to be fruitful for each other and our listeners.

Volovec: It's easier to find niche music now, that's why collage is growing. I really love collage due to the fact that you can stick sounds with different meanings together so they move around in a nice way. There is something really great about a wall of sound of these noises.

departure: echoing a lot of the stuff that RNTT was mentioning i think it’s also worth noting the resurgence of hauntology culture in g the general mainstream consciousness. kind of similar to the remixes of shit that’s trending right now like what he said, but also in the general aesthetics. the origins of hauntology are based in Jacques Derrida and his book Spectres of Marx, in which he based most of his ideas on the Marx quote that “a spectre is haunting Europe - the spectre of communism.” maybe the ideas that are re-emerging in the public consciousness aren’t a product of communism per se but those aesthetics are being revived. especially in my own work i’m inspired by how Fakemink has become really emblematic of those ideas without pontificating on them at the same time. i think that those ideas about hauntology also influence our work as well, we’re not really afraid to sample or not sample specific things. it’s based on whatever it means to us and whether we think it’s appropriate to be re-contextualized.

Monomatism: I think sound collage can be extremely emblematic of how atomized we all are at this current moment in time, at least in the States. Especially with the rise of the internet, how so much human knowledge and art is so readily available these days, it can feel like an avalanche of information. Sound collage music can often capture that rapid flow of information well, and recontextualize it into something new.

JD: The first full release by you guys, after an oklou cover, is a split album with Boxelder titled 'iniibig kita' reads: "inspired by the tortured poets department" by taylor swift"... could you elaborate? Was it intentionally released on Valentine's Day?

RNTT: It wasn’t in the original bio initially, was kind of a tongue and cheek thing as I saw the whole “Tortured Poet’s Department” concept as a boujee “I’m sad and in love” thing, and with my background, I guess I was doing the same thing around that time, Iniibig Kita literally meaning an older form of “I love you” in my fatherland’s language Tagalog. I wouldn’t say it has any correlation as it stands, but the joke aged well in retrospect as I realized in the end Taylor Swift just did what I did, just a lot more honest. She probably should stop flying those planes though, not a massive fan of that. It was released on Valentine's day intentionally. I was a big sap back then, kinda how it is when you’re 14, the world’s pushing down on you, and you’re accompanied by two incredible producers alongside an incredible composer in Boxelder.

Rescue Dawn: RNTT loves to mess around with the descriptions of the albums, as he’s said earlier it’s been changed multiple times and if I remember one of them it was “Fuck Patrick Mahomes.” and he doesn’t even watch football (I don’t either). Next time I hope he puts “Fuck Anthony Black.” as he keeps selling our Real drafts.

mmryxloss: I wasn’t on this project, but it introduced me to Boxelder, he’s tha goat fr, thanks for helping me finish my album :)

JD: One of the releases that really caught my attention was 'we had our last dance in a vacant parking lot', a mix, really an intervention of a lot of acoustic covers of songs. I'd really like to know where the idea came from.

RNTT: When I was a kid, one of my first favorite songs was The Macaroons Project’s cover of “Leaving on a Jet Plane” and this cover of Yesterday by The Beatles from ACMusic7. I learnt that people making covers on YouTube a decade ago was one of the purest forms of expression; using the things they know to express what they feel. Really beautiful concept. I remember my first concept of melancholy in the form of music was hearing a really passionate “Why’d, she, have to go, I don’t know, she wouldn’t stay.” Kind of an ode to everything that brought me here. The title was because I was at an iHOP a few years back and I just found the atmosphere really beautiful. I imagined someone having their last dance with no one around, no glamour just finality and the fluorescent glow of stars. That’s where the title came from.

Rescue Dawn: This mix I believe frankly is one of our best things we have ever accomplished. I was still on FL Studio Mobile at the time and I was maxing out the potential of whatever I could do with that crappy program, and somehow it’s turned out to be still some of our most inspiring material ever. I literally remember making the “soulmeetsbody” remix while playing All Star Tower Defense on Roblox, it was quite great.

Monomatism: This mix was actually supposed to be the launching point for another, spin-off band funnily enough. I’m kind of sad that it didn’t come to fruition, but if it did the trajectory of The Dealers would probably veer off course radically. So much love to Jasmine Smoke, though.

RNTT: In its own way it did work out. We did make Pop music like we were expecting to.

JD: Now, as most people, I think, my first approach to your music was through your album "Against The Howling Winds". It is a tremendously beautiful record and I agree with it being the culmination of what you have done so far. With you saying it is "about growing up and the pain inherent in becoming someone or something else", I wonder, how do feel about it now that it's almost been a year after release?

Volovec: I mean it could be better. But it's smart not to think of the past with this mentality. So I enjoy the fact that the album exists.

Rescue Dawn: I was only on three songs, so I think this album could be better.

RNTT: One of my biggest passions besides music lies in psychology. In psychology, when we talk about “memory” it usually is about reconsolidation. The past is never truly “the past” when looked back upon because you will get slightly wrong memories, sometimes incredibly miniscule differences, as you retrieve them repeatedly. That’s why I’m really glad Against the Howling Winds exists given the fact it freeze-frames one of the most vulnerable, romantic, and formative years of my life. The past is safe in art, in the same way photobooks hold things that were never said.

Volovec: Psychology is cool stuff. The human mind and condition influences our music. You can draw influence from anything if you try hard enough. New age religions and birds are stuff I draw from sometimes.

departure: i think one thing that we all shared in common with the record was either going through some monumental change in our lives, or being on the cusp of a monumental change. i know for me, that was about finishing up high school and thinking about the prospect of higher education and what i wanted to do when i became an adult. i had already had this sprawling career behind me in juvenalia and Against the Howling Winds is just another record in those accomplishments. having that record be an anchor for me throughout my entire last year of high school really helped with having to come to terms with reality. and i think the release of the record was a final send-off to my childhood, as it came out a few weeks before my 18th birthday. you make a lot of mistakes in your life, but most of them come from your youth. and a lot of them are really silly. and sometimes you have to learn to be okay with that, and understand and know who you are. when people talk about “growing pains” as a metaphor most people think about having to find comfort in the uncomfortable, i see it as learning to find solace in yourself despite your mistakes.

mmryxloss: I think ATHW is a flawed but pretty awesome record that I am glad to be a part of. We are all young, still growing as artists, growing together, and it might take another decade before everything really all clicks. Being limited to discord group chats where you have to constantly put on DND because RNTT mentions everyone about a Draymond Green photo can suck, but I also think this makes the experience unique. I’m glad RNTT is here to orchestrate everything, he really set in stone something that means a lot to me and I know the other members of the group. ATHW was being crafted in a dark spot of my life. The project was an essential reason to continue making music even though I was giving up. It’s hard to say what this record truly means for me, even a year later. I know it means more to RNTT than for me, but I am glad I was able to help him create something that resembles a timestamp for the group but also us as individuals.

Monomatism: I myself am tremendously proud of the record. I don’t want to say too much since I did pick the name, but even today I think it ranks among our best projects. Until the release of our next album it’s also probably the project we’ll be most known for, it certainly gets the most radio play out of our entire discography.

JD: I'm sure you've heard about this a lot already but the ending to that album is amazing. It's such a special track in how it really redefines the idea of a "cover" not only by the original song being used within it, but how it dialogues with it. For me it sounds like how Every Breath You Take first sounded, like it is about the memory of that song and not the song in itself…? Am I overthinking this?

Volovec: The song itself is built up from a collage of sounds from around a year prior up to the date when we decided we wanted to cover EBYT. I would send random sounds in the GC, and thankfully Departure brought them together around 6 months prior to when we wanted to cover EBYT. The weird synth sounds in the background are from a chance recording I did at my grandma’s in Slovakia using a toy synth. So in a lot of ways the track is like a dream or memory of that song. Maybe even a radio recording in another reality.

Monomatism: The use of the interview clip in the intro definitely allows for an interpretation of the cover as being in a sort of dialogue with the original track, but I also think most great covers elicit that idea anyway without being so upfront about it. Then again, interview clips are one of our staples.

departure: yeah, back in i want to say october 2024 volovec was sending some demos of synths that he was toying around with, i threw a couple into my SP-404 and then played around with them, re-recorded them into my DAW and then created sort of a really loose backbone that would only become an early version of “Every Breath You Take” once i put two and two together and slapped the acapella from the original track over the backbone i had created. we didn’t come back to it until way, way later in the recording process for Against the Howling Winds because RNTT kind of wanted to set it aside for it to be the last thing we would make for the record. which in retrospect i think was a good decision.

RNTT: The song itself we thought of while me, mmryxloss, and Rescue Dawn were watching a top 50 song list, I think it was LosPollosTV funny enough. Every Breath You Take was on it and I said out loud “man, this would sound amazing as an Ethereal Wave song” and mmryxloss and Rescue Dawn agreed. Then months came by, beautiful people and beautiful things came and went, and we only had one song left on the record, with everything else done, we were just waiting on Hollis to get back to us in July of 2025, and we got the riff, it was just him, his guitar, and him singing Every Breath You Take. Then, Departure uses the first thing we ever made for LP3 as we called it at the time, and puts it over Every Breath You Take. Around this time, I was ruminating a lot, and I think it leaked into the artistic atmosphere. Suddenly, this cool idea we had a few months back was just us trying to capture that misery of trying to keep somebody safe when you were falling apart. That’s kind of why the outro is repeated in the intro, then twice over in the outro.

Rescue Dawn: Yeah it was a spur of the moment thing, it was W RNTT thinking.

mmryxloss: Every Breath You Take is still one of my favourite things that I’ve done and my personal favourite Sleep Dealers track. I remember a couple weeks after I had left the psych ward that I was in for a month, I became really enamored with the bridge of the Police’s classic track. It was haunting and beautiful, emotions I hadn’t felt in a while. I spent a few hours making my own cover and I had sent it to departure to re-work. I remember I didn’t like the original mix, and when I heard the single released I was scared. This was something I was really proud of, but sometimes you just gotta put trust in those around you. The single release was amazing, bettered by the album version. When the album came out it was one of those songs that I had repeated for a couple weeks. While I do understand that I did do the vocals and the central instrumentation, the collaborative efforts from other members and feature artists was essential for the completion of the track. I usually don’t like listening to my own music back, as hearing any slight imperfection makes me go crazy… however I feel safe in returning to this magnificent conclusion, and can happily appreciate the beauty of it all without feeling embarrassed for self-glazing.

departure: the radio edit that we put out shortly before the album came out was basically entirely my version. so i did all the engineering on that, and all of the structuring and whatnot to kind of fit what mmryxloss wanted based on everything he had sent me of his instrumentation and vocals. the album edit, i didn’t have a part in that intro section before the Justin Bieber spoken word sample, or the outro that comes in during the huge bass drop. the outro was basically all Reverie.

JD: We've recently talked to Weed420, who you've worked with on a mix for DJ's Against Disease and I want to repeat one of the ideas I discussed there. I think collectives are always a necessity when making some kind of "out-of-boundaries" or avant-garde music. Has Sleep Dealers changed something for your personal projects or maybe your life?

Volovec: The Sleep Dealers made me start making ambient music again and better. I was just doing wall noise when I joined (Nothing against this genre. Check out Silver Dove and Smisao života je sloboda by Dosis Letalis) and the Dealers gave me the ideas to make other types of music if that makes sense.

Monomatism: I think one of the main strengths of The Dealers as a collective lies in bringing together all of these ostensibly quite disparate personalities and having them bristle up against each other to produce something they couldn’t have made otherwise. Though to be sure, many of the Dealers are also great solo acts in their own right. As for how my time with the dealers has affected my personal work and life, it certainly made me more confident to put my own shit out there.

departure: i have to say i’m not really sure that i agree. i think being in tune with yourself at least in my experience is just as beneficial to the goal of trying to make some sort of “out-of-boundaries” work. i think a really good example of this is /f who makes a lot of if not all of her music alone. and i know a couple of us take inspiration from her, for me most notably in my newest solo record work of artist i love you. but to your main point the relationships i’ve developed being a part of the collective have definitely shaped my personal work, i’ve collaborated with volovec a few times under his Granite Sky alias for my solo projects, and we all work with each other and our colleagues quite frequently outside of our work as the Sleep Dealers.

RNTT: When it comes down to my solo work, I don’t see myself making big collage pieces about lovers, the country, or a future urban life. I think The Sleep Dealers revealed something a lot purer than the actual music; The genuine love of companionship, and the joy of creation. We’re really akin to an AAU basketball team, young, scrappy, and trying to find any means to express our experiences using the mediums we love. I don’t think I’ll look back on The Sleep Dealers postpartum and think about the music, maybe more about me and the guys trying to figure out what to text a girl, or Volovec posting random guys in the groupchat and asking if they’re hypnagogic, or me and Isaac doing really bad karaoke over songs we barely enjoy. The change The Sleep Dealers brought to me, is the change of belonging. Honestly, the art is worthless without the people behind it. I really do love my people.

JD: I think a lot of terms have been thrown around to try and make sense of what you and a whole bunch of other collectives and artists on the internet are trying to do recently. I personally like 'New Internet Sound' just as Lindsey puts it on her homonymous list in Rate Your Music, but what do you think about that label and what it encompasses or even the act of labeling it?

Linsdey: Sometimes I have to confront my own lists and categorizations in uncomfortable ways when someone comes to me and asks *why* I included them. I don’t overthink these things much, or view them as absolute really. I’m mostly just trying to gather sounds that I personally enjoy and give them some sort of half-assed name. New Internet, in particular, is less of a genre and more of a scene. It’s kids on discord from three different continents trying to make something cohesive, almost spiritual. There are other pseudo-genres I’m associated with, which feel much more like *genres*, like “Dawk” or “Laptop-Twee”. But the New Internet Sound is moreso a way of making and publishing music, as opposed to a solidified genre.

RNTT: I don’t really hold an opinion in all honesty. I think labelling music is nice for taxonomy, I think trying to group a lot of musicians who have different directions such as us and everyone else who may fall under New Internet Sound may threaten direct cohesion as a scene. I definitely consider us a scene, and I’m not adverse to the name of “New Internet Sound” shoutout Lindsey, she’s awesome.

Rescue Dawn: New internet sound sounds cool but I need something with a ring to it.

Volovec: I don’t really know if a label to the sound makes much sense. I would consider it to be a way to bring folks together.

Monomatism: There’s a certain danger in over-categorization, especially when it comes to music, as the more or less continuous and river-like history of a genre can be lost in compartmentalization. New Internet Sound does have a cool ring to it though, makes it sound like we’re part of something big.

departure: i like the idea of the New Internet Sound, i think i consider myself kind of adjacent to it as well although i don’t work in the same primary genres as some of the better examples. There's a lot of people in our Center for New Internet Artistry discord that are straight up not adjacent to it at all lol. that was a server that was started for the weed420 dj mix collaboration and then turned into sort of a larger community for all the artists that we knew. I like to see it as more of a larger construct of artists that exist on the Internet or have been shaped by it in some capacity, just coming together to make some really cool art. In some ways I see it as our own version of an Elephant 6.

Seconding that, I think there’s a fairly traceable lineage. like back in the day when people used to shit on Skrillex relentlessly cause they were all like, oh look at this fucking doofus who only makes shit on a laptop lol. As if he's not insanely talented in his own right. That's the same shit we do except it’s not brostep it’s just emotionally charged collages based on our own taste and life experience. The only thing I fear though is that people will see us as just abstractions of humans that exist on the internet and exist to make music that just gets posted on the internet and doesn’t go anywhere else. Some people have called me an “internet rapper” before, and I don't know how accurate that is. So I’ve personally tried to avoid just existing on the internet and trying to get my name out there locally.

mmryxloss: I think there are things that we do that wouldn’t be possible without the internet (actually most things…), but that’s how music and technology goes. There are objective improvements to sound and quality replication and then we just use what we can to make the best music we can. I don’t know how I really feel about the term, I don’t see a real scene happening, just microcosms consisting of music enjoyer’s. I agree with the things departure says, people like to put terms on things so people can make rejections and criticisms of artists without even listening to them. That’s the inconsistency with genre and style labelling. I think this new term could be something we are a part of, but personally, I don’t subscribe to this idea, life is fluid, so is music. Also, we have REAL lives, we do make music through the means of the internet and technology, but we can only conjure the ideas we have through the lives we live, and the internet can be a pretty toxic place… I’m going off topic imma shut up to keep this train on the tracks.

JD: Hopefully this next question is fun: is there a specific moment, production choice, or addition made by another member of the group that stands out as your favorite?

RNTT: Off our second album, this song titled “cigarette smoke goes up to heaven” our boy Rescue Dawn collaged a bunch of covers from a YouTube channel belonging to someone named peace. We got them in the same scale, collaged them over this beautiful piano piece, then just ended it off with a desolate: “I’m falling, can you help me up?” One of our crowning moments and a technique we have persistently used, we call it “Cigarette Smoking.”

Volovec: Ya, Rescue Dawn is great. Crazy stuff he can do. Also shoutout Departure, very important to the sound of Howling Winds. My favorite moment would be the piano on ciggy smoke. It was sourced from an interesting place ;).

Rescue Dawn: Thanks for the compliments guys, but I personally have a different favorite moment. With pg.231, I feel like it’s one of our most complete and emotionally vulnerable songs and I made basically the entire base of the song, but what is truly special is what lies in the sample of it. The specific Moon River cover me and RNTT chose to base it off is a famous African American adult performer covering it. You can most likely find who it is if you search on youtube “Moon River Saxophone Cover”.

RNTT: Departure is him.

Monomatism: Right in the first few seconds of “intermission,” there’s this quarter-second long vocal chop I think about all the time. That entire song is just great compositionally.

departure: the rest of the guys did a really good job keeping a similar theme and sound for the title track on Against the Howling Winds, which was the only track i didn’t contribute to because i had a personal grudge about it that’s been long resolved. <3

mmryxloss: volovec has some great moments on all our records, it’s a charm when he uploads some random sample on the discord chat.

JD: I think while you might still be all just starting to gain traction, I'd like to believe me hearing about you guys is some sort of signal that something is being done right. Do you have any ambitions of how far you want the project to go?

Volovec: We’ve discussed this. But it's hard to see the future. We make music as time goes.

Monomatism: In my mind The Dealers will exist for as long as the ideas we want to convey require it. There’s no real way to say where we’ll be in even a few months, let alone years out.

departure: i feel like we’re gonna be one of those groups that exists for as long as one person or a few people wants to keep it going. kind of like how there’s not a single founding member of Lynyrd Skynyrd in the group anymore, but it’s still an active band. we’ve kind of developed this tendency with each record to add members or rotate members around, and i think that’s just kind of how we’ll exist. it’ll make for some really interesting group lore, but we’re probably never going to have a consistent lineup. my primary purpose is to help execute what RNTT and the other members have in place for their vision of whatever they’d like to make or do as the Sleep Dealers.

RNTT: All the way. I have delusional confidence in us given where I’m from. I know a homegrown effort where we make music that speaks to us can impact people from all over the place given the things we are saying and doing. We also want everyone who rocked with us to go up with us. I’d love Bay Area athletes joining FC’s, or in Vogue, or in Billboard. I am incredibly confident in us, admittedly, delusionally. There are no stage lights, just the sun.

mmryxloss: Patty is right, if one of us exists, the Sleep Dealers will always be here. What’s that quote say? Something like the first time you die is when you stop breathing and the second time is when your name is said for the last time? Idk, but I think our music can always be a beating heart for ourselves and those who enjoy our tenure making music. I would love to keep this thing going until the wheels fall off. I don’t think we will be THAT popular ever, just microcelebrities within a very niche music space, but regardless of how many people know us, love us, or hate us, I think we will all be making music with each other because we enjoy creating with each other. We are friends at the end of the day, and I think that’s why it works. RNTT still needs to send me those stems and lyrics so I can do vocals on the new project but he’s slacking like usual.

Rescue Dawn: I wanna live off this if possible but either way i’d be happy if this group continued for a very long time.

JD: I think after reading this, I just had a moment where I realized artists really aren't as sappy as they used to be, actually it's been quite a while since I've heard the word itself. Don't you feel like we should kind of go back there sometimes, too?

RNTT: Are we talking like people like Elvis singing “love me tender” in the 70s

JD: Maybe I'd even say 2012 "Fun." hit single, We Are Young.

RNTT: Oh, for sure. A lot of artists were still very tender, especially in the 2010s; it’s just that the commercial focus shifted away from a more hedonistic direction, as these cycles have been doing since the 1950s. Even the so-called “bad boys” of music have deep-cut romantic songs, like Chief Keef with Slow Dance, for example. I think both sides are necessary to the human experience.

JD: No way to measure the sappy without a bit of edgy.

RNTT: Exactly, yeah.

JD: But yeah, it’s really interesting when artists are able to find sincerity and tenderness within experimental music. “Experimental” almost comes with its own emotional associations, usually something colder or more unsettling, maybe because the unknown itself can feel frightening. There are quite a handful of artists that I think really succeed at this, and it’s something I find myself thinking about very often.

RNTT: Have you heard of the psychological concept of gestalt?

JD: A little bit but maybe it'd be better if you tell me about it.

RNTT: The human brain automatically tends to assume that what it’s seeing is the entirety of something, almost as if it’s filling in the blanks on its own.

JD: Oh yeah, I think I’ve mostly heard that idea in relation to visual design and things like that, but I kind of see where you’re going with this.

RNTT: I think experimental music is an attempt to see the whole picture. Music, to me, is a flawed medium, and I think that’s why so many flawed people take solace in it. Experimental music just doesn’t pretend that everything makes sense. Not to discredit pop music or any other form of music as lesser or inferior, or to place experimental music into some kind of hierarchy, they’re just different ways of representing an incomplete whole.

JD: Yeah, I get what you mean, and I think I agree. I guess that’s also the more interesting part about music: you have to fill in even more blanks, because on average we don’t really imagine as much with sound as we do with images. I was reading this book I blind-bought recently, and I’ve been thinking a lot about this idea that in music, every sound, even the most minuscule, abstract idea of “a sound,” beyond instruments themselves, is an act of communication. You can’t really control the context, nor the ears that receive those sounds, and music especially gets really “contaminated” by outside factors. I’d say a lot of experimental music unconsciously accepts that idea: just honest output, without trying to fully control what is being heard, knowing you really can’t.

RNTT: Definitely agreed. It’s music without expectations.

JD: Yup. In shorter words, that’s a great way to put it. Would you say TSD is trying to push the fullest possible image of yourself, or is that image still constrained by certain boundaries?

RNTT: The Sleep Dealers is definitely me trying to express myself as fully as possible, but I can’t really give all of myself when I don’t even fully know who I am yet. I still consciously suppress a lot of things because, like a lot of teenagers who don’t really go out much, I’m afraid of a lot of things. I don’t know all of myself, but I know a lot of myself, and I express that very consciously.

I’d say my most vulnerable moment with The Sleep Dealers, in terms of self-expression, was while we were making Against The Howling Winds. I lost somebody I loved very deeply because of external circumstances, and I only really had one song to write about it. I was trying to make sense of what was happening and trying to express myself through art, because that was really all I knew how to do at the time. So would I say it’s the fullest possible image of myself? In ten years, probably not. Right now, though, yes.

And as for everyone else in the band, I think what we have is incredibly beautiful. Everyone in the group buys into the ideas of romance and love that I’ve kind of built up around the project, because at the end of the day, loving and being loved is a universal experience. I remember one of our members got broken up with either the day before or the day of Valentine’s Day, the same day we dropped our record, and we still finished it regardless. It almost became this act of camaraderie.

When ATHW was about to come out, I was completely heartbroken because of those same external circumstances involving the person I had been in love with, and truthfully, I’m surprised the record even came out considering everything happening around that time. My bandmates really carried the vision I was trying to create while I was emotionally at my lowest. I think that sense of camaraderie is something we all share. Even if we’re just stupid, rambling teenagers sometimes, we still have something I don’t think even artists like David Bowie, Paul McCartney, or John Lennon could replicate, and that’s that misty-eyed feeling you have when you’re young. You can’t really take that away from us. A lot of bands try to express that feeling, but I think what makes us special is how unabashed we are about it.

JD: I just realized I haven’t even asked, how old are you?

RNTT: Seventeen. I started us at fourteen.

JD: That’s awesome. Have you and the other guys ever thought about doing this full-time as adults, or do you see yourselves going into different careers? I remember that being a huge thing for me when I thought about making art at that age.

RNTT: Personally, I don’t really want to define a direction yet, because I can’t predict the future. I can’t say for certain that I’ll want to make music forever, but one thing I can say confidently is that we’re definitely all going to stay friends.

JD: imagen

JD: To finish this off, any last words?

RNTT: Big ups to all my people. Genuinely. I can’t say I love everyone in all certainty but I do know I want everyone to love. As we continue to deviate from our more romantic sound, I want everyone to know the core is still in love. Every single song is a love song in some way. There is a certain thing I think is necessary when sentimental and vulnerable in the way we are, and I think that is to never meet your heroes before you meet yourself, even us.

Volovec: Shoutout to all birds and music people.

Linsdey: Peace to the world, end Imperialism.

departure: Fuck ICE. fuck trump. fuck israel. freedom and peace to all oppressed peoples across the world. thank you to everyone who’s ever believed in me. love to everyone and the rest of the group. mom and dad and stacey i will never stop making you proud.

Monomatism: Free Palestine.

RNTT: God bless the Philippines. I love my immigrant parents and grandparents. Big ups to my boys and girls in the Bay and everywhere else. Protect the dolls.. I love Brandin Podziemski.

Glass Structure: Klay Thompson ate eggs after eleven.

Rescue Dawn: Jokic For MVP, Danilo Serbia Respect Button, Free Palestine.

mmryxloss: Free Palestine. Free Congo. Free Sudan. Freedom for all oppressed peoples on earth, it’s time for class solidarity! The last capitalist we hang shall be the one who sold us the rope. Love yall’s, mmryxloss LP2 out soon, stay tuned <3