Sick Days is music for the summer. Vacancy operator Jeffrey Sinibaldi’s flagship project wrests sleepy beauty from the heat-shimmered doldrums, the lengthy meditations leaving plenty of room to breathe. Since the release of the sprawling and eclectic self-titled double CD (a modern classic of DIY experimental music if you ask me) back in 2019, subsequent cassette documents like The Calm Before and Org Chert Baker have narrowed the focus to patient, droning collages of slurred field recordings, reticent improvisations, and everything in between. There’s an easygoing holism to Sinibaldi’s approach that makes for an understated yet irresistible atmosphere. He uses every tool at his disposal to cobble together unified soundscapes that feel ambiguous and straightforward, tense and languid, all at once. Even with such a high bar already set, Dress Entire offers up his most magnetic material in years. Each side grounds itself in drowsy tactility—A with lapping water and percussive shuffle that could be a washing machine, ghost-train traffic, or one of the project’s mysterious “live installations”; B with delicate precipitation tickles and distorted speech—and slowly but surely progresses with measured momentum. Nothing happens suddenly. New textures ease themselves in as if submerging into a pool on a sweltering evening, already deep in the mix before you realize what’s happening. Both the sweat on your brow and the cool cloth you use to wipe it off. The crickets and the condensation and the steam of life.
Noise Not Music 