Sleep and The Traveller formed in the suburban wasteland that stretches along the Baltimore-Washington I-95 corridor--part of the greater Washington metropolitan sprawl that spans from Northern Virginia to the Baltimore beltway. Years after disbanding in its original incarnation at the University of Maryland College Park, the band reformed and released In Distant Lands in January 2006, quickly followed up by The DJ Jo EP . Their second full-length LP Machine Gun Theory is currently in the works, to be released in early 2007.
Machine Gun Theory Update
We're still not sure if all of the songs on The DJ Jo EP will make it onto Machine Gun Theory. However, we're still on track to release the album in early 2007. There will be less acoustic material on this album than on In Distant Lands and the heavy songs may well be heavier than that album's title track and Last Dance , but they shouldn't be mistaken for metal and the stylistic variety should not be as jarring (e.g., there will be no equivalent to A Minor Song ). Machine Gun Theory will be very much a guitar-oriented album, but it will feature less of the sparse guitar of The Stars Will Shine and more of the multi-guitar textures of Not Today , A Long Forgotten Song , and When She Spins . We hope you'll like it.
Friend Requests
As a general rule, if you're a band or a label and receive a friend request from Sleep and The Traveller, it's because we heard your music on MySpace or elsewhere. The number of independent bands making music today is staggering. We're always interested in hearing new music and, unfortunately, MySpace is a better way of doing that than listening to the radio (with the exception of a few independent stations--but even they can fall into a rut of playing a lot of the same stuff over and over). Also, we're always looking for opportunities to meet and play with other musicians. So if you like our music and we like your music, jams and collaborations may follow. Finally, we believe in supporting independent music in whatever way we can.
If you're not a band, label, radio station, etc. (i.e., you're an individual human being with a personal MySpace page), we sent you a friend request probably because you are a friend of a friend and we thought you might like to be our friend too. Or maybe you're a writer who wrote something we liked, or a photographer who takes photos we think are cool, or a DJ who plays great songs we've never heard before, and so on.
Indie Bands You Should Check Out
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The Swains