It took me awhile to 'get' Jamie xx's "Sleep Sound", the B-side to his 2014 single "Girl". The mostly-instrumental track features fluid, dreamy beats that are occassionally accompanied by sampled vocals from Alicia Keys' "Karma" (Jamie xx co-produced "When It's All Over" for her Girl on Fire album). It sounds like the kind of track you can dance to when you're wide-awake in the early hours of the morning and the city around you is all asleep. There's an echo of loneliness in the track, a quality that makes the track seem like something you have to experience in private.
The music video further contributes to the imaginative potentialities that the track opens up. Inspired by a moment on a subway - “I was on a train listening to music, getting deep into it, and this girl started staring at me. After a while I took my headphones off and she came up to me, started signing and then wrote me a note to say that she was deaf but could almost feel the music by my movement" - London-based artist and poet Sofia Mattioli was compelled to direct a music video that featured 13 members of the Manchester Deaf Centre (with ages ranging from five to 27 years old) who danced with her, guided by the vibrations in the air given off by the song (2014).
The aim was to initiate a "journey where love, imagination, silence and music join together to become a whole". Can one 'hear' music without working eardrums? Given this experiment and Beethoven's ability to compose after going deaf, it appears that the mind can 'imagine' sounds in the same way that one can close one's eyes and imagine a visual. With Mattioli's compelling experiment/performance art, "Sleep Sound" offers music for the ears, food for thought and empathy for the heart: what more can you ask for from a song?
