How Can I Possibly Sleep When There Is Music begins with a deceptively simple exchange: the call and response of an artless whistle and the thud of a wood-block. As if a herald to the band, these two sounds precipitate a kaleidoscope of swirling movement and the intoxicating sounds of spiritual jazz, folk and blues that carve out the sonic terrain. Conceived as a record of adaptations and responses “to a millennia of poetry”, the album draws together the poems of Ryōkan … mehrTaigu, Bohdan Ihor Antonych, Rainer Maria Rilke, Yosana Akiko, Du Fu, Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī, W.W.E Ross, Li Bai, and La Fontaine, placing them within a dynamic environment of ecstatic and imaginative expression. Think Bill Callahan meets Don Cherry’s Organic Music Society, an ECM produced Leonard Cohen record, or Lou Reed fronting the Astral Weeks band, and you get a sense of the record’s unique terrain. weniger