While DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing set the standard for instrumental hip-hop records, the L.A. super-producer only has to look across the U.S. to find his east coast counterpart, in New York City ‘s DJ Signify, whom carries the torch for the sound birthed on Shadow’s debut. But just as RJD2 took Shadow’s concept and expanded on it in wildly different directions, Signify lends his own signature sound to dark and moody hip-hop beats. If you’ve ever imagined what these types of instrumentalists are trying to say with their wordless works, Signify’s Sleep No More could possibly answer that question, and raise several more at the same time. Reason being, is that Sleep No More delivers vocal contributions from storytellers Sage Francis and Buck 65, who animate seven of the DJ’s sinister soundtracks with their own mysterious musings.

     The album begins with the creeping “Fly Away”, which is made up an evil, looming bassline and slow, rhythmic, hard hitting drums, and samples that suggest it’s time to leave the waking world, and enter the land of dreams, before it reaches its nightmarish climax. The story then begins with the hollow “Kiddie Litter”, where Sage introduces himself as a depressed insomniac, struggling to shake off the impending “Migrane” that carries into Signify’s next solo instrumental. Followed by Buck 65 with “Stranded”, insomniac theatre continues, as Buck recounts the tale of his broken down car on Lost Highway, leading him to the worst motel possible. Buck laments with beautifully horrific, visual detail “The bathroom was crawling with roaches and beetles / a sign above the toilet said don’t flush your needles / the towels were all yellow / the bathtub was all filthy / somebody had wrote on the wall the word ‘guilty’ / unable to speak, our thoughts were in brackets / we called it a night, and slept in our jackets.” Beautifully written, and even stranger spoken, but somehow works perfectly.

    “Haunted House Party” features Sage on the mic again, this time reading from his personal journals, recalling late night coffee talk with death (or the devil), over one of Signfy’s best tracks yet. Propelled by hollow bass droplets and dirty, sticky synth, Sage tells the tale, letting his verse trail off into a whisper with the lines “Bastard, puts on the lenses that were scratched like / someone got the best of him in a cat fight / must have been when he developed that bad sight / but they don’t help, he needs a helmet with a flashlight / if he thinks he can enter the darkness at half-price / to find his daughter’s black wedding dress from a past life / traditions died at a haunted house party last night / somebody sound out for the body bag pipes”. At that very (dope) moment, Signify catches his cue, sounding the bag pipes at the start of the following track, as Buck 65 comes back with the gloomy “Winter’s Going”. This loose knit story of insomniacs trapped in DJ Signify’s dreamscape continues throughout the rest of the album, reaching its highest point on Sage’s “Cup Of Regret”, another successfully dreary concoction where Francis weaves a strange web of post-death, male pregnancy poetics.  

     However, while Buck and Sage are there to give purpose to Signify’s beats, without them, this project could easily be overlooked as “just another instrumental album”, Signify’s production is a style all his own, but lacks the air-tight technique of Shadow or the stylization of RJD2. While the drums hit hard, and the samples are interesting, at times it seems completely random, with experimental sound effects thrown in without reason, which could be looked at as a lazy way to create this type of mood or sound. Signify definitely has something on his hands here (just look at the inside artwork), and predictably, the more experience with his equipment he gains, the better his future works will be. This is a decent debut with several standout moments, however it might take a few more albums of improvement before everyone decides to Sleep No More.