The Refractors are a duo from Pacifica, California that make trippy, experimental music by improvising. They describe the process they use as similar to allowing a garden to take form, and the results are certainly worth listening to.Eight Year Sleep is approximately twenty-two minutes long, and while not everything they try works perfectly, the album more than succeeds in transporting us to a dreamlike environment.

Eight Year Sleep is a very unique album, not only because of the variety of instruments used or the field recordings present in many tracks (they wouldn't be the first to do either of those things), but because they have accomplished something not many artists attempt to do: create work that appears so distant from anything we would consider reality. The album brings to mind the spooky surrealism of David Lynch and the work of Angelo Badalamenti, the composer Lynch most often works with. It is no wonder that they score their own short films, as the music is very cinematic. Songs sung by the two members of the band (Joseph and Kayline) are followed by droney instrumentals that one would imagine were meant to be lullabies, if the lyrics were not so unsettling.

"A Fall Disguised as a Rise" sounds like an instrumental version of a Piano Magic song, and "Lull", which follows, reminds us of the Cocteau Twins, and not only because Kayline's voice sounds so much like that of Elizabeth Fraser. The duo's tendency to not constrain themselves and let the music develop unconventionally has given the album a mystical quality that draws you to it and drugs you into devoting your full attention to it. Kayline's whispery vocals in "Divisive Static" bring to mind Meanwhile, Back in Communist Russia, but the highlight of the album is "Swept Away," where Joseph, with an acoustic guitar and strange sounds in the background, sings about memories of childhood, a song that Will Oldham or Smog would have been envious of, not only for its wonderful lyrics, but because they've never made a song in which the music, which sounds like a dusted memory itself, so perfectly complements the story being told.

The brevity of the album may be considered a minus by some, but in less than half an hour, The Refractors are able to deliver an album that sounds great during the day and even better at night. Badalamenti would be proud.

-John Kontos