| slow wave sleep |‘s music catalog, as well as its music videos and social media content, is based on a concept, a fictional story to which the songs refer more or less explicitly. Each release is a chapter of this surreal story, inspired by reality and extreme as in dreams. That’s why each album represents a dream instead of a single part of the story: all ideas are brought to me as dreamlike feelings, blurred memories I have to translate into music from time to time. I would be more accurate about the details if I were writing the whole thing by my sole will.
Slow-wave sleep is the third (maybe even fourth) stage of sleep, the one in which we keep vital functions to a minimum. We enter a state of total hypnosis and we do not remember anything of it. This is where memories mix up to create dreams, and the ones that we can remember are only a small part of the REM phase before we wake up.
About SWS
Slow Wave Sleep tells the story of Spiro, a fictional character who’s the incarnation of Rèfles, an Archetype.
Rèfles is made of human repressed emotions, that wander in a single direction in the form of black plasma to be gathered in a liquid mass: his body. He’s acquired his consciousness over time and lives in a parallel dimension together with other Archetypes. He can communicate with humans only through dreams and art.
In the first eight episodes, some details of the characters were revealed within the concept. While in the previous demos, in the first three volumes of Hypnagogic, L’Ultimo Uomo and Chroma everything happened in the dimension of Archetypes in an disconnected way (frequent time travel, interplanetary shifts, adventures in the seven stages of the chakra, etc.), with Spiro nell’Ecosistema, the third album, and the following releases, the action moves to Earth and assumes linearity.
About Rèfles
Rèfles has been imprisoned for having acquired too much weight. With the spread of the internet, repressed emotions have increased exponentially, and now the other Archetypes are fearing this enormous accumulation of power. From prison, he manages to escape on Earth by taking possession of the body of Spiro, a lone fisherman of the Rhine River. On a stormy day, thunder falls on the poor fisherman’s head and so the switch happens.
Rèfles’ new mission on Earth is to give back the emotions to humans, therefore he can be released from prison once regained its original state. To do this, Spiro paints three stripes on people’s faces with his black blood. The left part of his body is made of the same material as Rèfles, while the other half retains human features.
About Spiro’s duality and his first year on Earth
Spiro has always a knife in his pocket to nick his left hand where he dips the brush into the black blood. However, the human side of him has a side effect: in moments of tension, he can explode with anger, a blind fury from which he can only subside by suffering severe physical trauma. When it happens he uses to bite his right palm, always trying not to arouse suspicion.
Spiro has been spotted in the woods by a group of hikers, who will be the first on which he will perform the ritual, at night, without being discovered. After a couple of suspicious approaches, the group of newfound friends manages to get Spiro to tell his story. They then decide to help him and take him to the city.
Once in Vemetown, this is the name of the destination, they rent a hotel room for the night. However, when Spiro wakes up, everyone’s gone and there is the whole bill to pay. Alone and disillusioned, he stays in the city for almost one year, trying to fit in society and hide his true identity, sometimes forgetting it. He’s coldly received from fellow citizens, despite his polite and generous attitude.
He discovers on long walks in nature a way to escape the negative mood, and he even befriends a shepherd. During a walk, he accidentally finds himself in a new place, which is total blue and full of weird animals doing weird things. It’s Planet Vena, a parallel dimension discovered by chance during moments of mental instability. In Vena there’s no air, no money, and no death. It’s inhabited by imaginary friends with whom he manages to create a bridge between the two realities by traveling on a ghost ship called The Flying Dutchman, which flies over Vemetown at night.
But one day the ship gets spotted by a little girl.
The rumor of the mad foreigner spreads out in the city and Spiro, unable to bear these prejudices, decides to move away from there. He goes to the Arctic, where he spends time trying to remotely get the attention of people with the Rite of the Three Nails.
Rèfles’ fragment
Rèfles’ journey on Earth was not complete. When he stole Spiro’s body, he left on purpose a fragment of him in prison to observe and eventually kill Spiro in case he doesn’t complete his mission for whatever reason. This fragment finds a way to connect with the four elements by altering the essential geometric patterns of things, thus opening a third channel of communication between Rèfles and humans in addition to dreams and art.
In his first eight weeks with us, he enters and exits dead plants and animals to steal their memories and study their genetic code. Then he killed Spiro, and cumulonimbus black clouds quickly expand everywhere.
| albums |
Spare time in the Arctic (2022)
Spiro nell’Egosistema (2021)
Natura Morta (2020)
Spiro nell’Ecosistema (2020)
Chroma (2018)
L’Ultimo Uomo (2018)
| eps |
Nubifragio (2023)
um (2022)
Hypnagogic Vol.5 (2021)
Hypnagogic Vol.4 (2021)
Gilberto nell’Egosistema (2021)
Points (2021)
| music videos |
Preludio Numero Due (2020)
Garuda (interactive – 2020)
Fiore di Loto (2020)
Valzer Nero (live in the Studio, 2019)
Elogio della Follia (2018)
Ragnarök (2018)
Parresìa (2018)
| demos |
Congruence (2017)
Hypnagogic Vol.1 (2016)
Animal Instincts (2015)
KAI (2015)
| extra |
Spettro (book 2018)
Vena (VR game – 2017)
Sgamos vs Fates (short film – 2016)