ctrl.alt.sleep (a project by Alex “ctrl” Chen and Cask J. Thomson) blends lo-fi electronic beats with analog warmth. The music focuses on shimmering synths and quiet melodies, designed for late-night drives or moments of reflection.

For their debut album, cmd+dream, the sound sits somewhere between a clear recording and a fading memory. By stripping away the polish, the music finds a more human, intimate feel – the perfect backdrop for drifting off.

The sound of cmd+dream lives in the fracture between fidelity and memory. It rejects spectacle in favour of a gentle vandalism – breaking down the music just enough to let the human element of programmed looped, samplers, and drum machines bleed through.

The music was recorded entirely in the analogue domain to cassette tape using a small mixer and Fostex X-30 Multitrack Cassette Recorder, with additional field recordings captured on a portable cassette recorder and played back through the mixer. Final mixes were transferred directly from the multitrack recorder to DSD 128 using a Tascam DA-3000 (which also functioned as the A/D converter). The digital transfer exists solely to present this analogue work faithfully in high-quality DSD. What you hear is not an emulation of tape – it is tape.

ctrl.alt.sleep
Alex “ctrl” Chen
Cask J. Thomson