Product Description
2 Indie
3 Elena
4 You Have Cured a Million Ghosts From Roaming in My Head
5 Inebria
6 The Ice (Feels Three Feet Thick Between Us)
7 Welcome Home
8 I Remember Life Above The Surface
Genres: Ambient, Indie Rock, Post-Rock
RIYL: Windy & Carl, Fennesz, Loscil, Stars of the Lid, Willam Basinski
Aarktica’s influential 2000 debut No Solace in Sleep approaches glacial guitar ambient from a post-rock perspective, enveloping the listener into a new sonic world of haunting, aquatic darkness and shimmering tonal light.
Godsend: Excellent and gently lulling ambient/drone frequencies from Jon DeRosa, who combines guitars and effects into a distinctly unified sound ala SEEFEEL but minus the beats and vocals. The icy, melodic aural terrain has a soft, introspective feel that conjures images of slowly enveloping fields of snow and trees swaying in a cold wintry wind. Just gorgeous work that’s well recommended.
In the fall of 2000, Aarktica’s debut No Solace in Sleep enchanted listeners with quietly majestic, blissed-out tape hiss lullabies and slow-motion ambient compositions that unfolded as subtly as an ice floe drifting in the ocean. One listener described the headphone experience as “like being in the womb,” evoking feelings of both solitude and comfort. Another imagined it as “the sound of ice melting,” and one early review declared that it “tapped directly into the heart of something older than speech” with the depth of melancholy and emotion it aroused.
On the 25th anniversary of Aarktica’s most popular work, the music continues to deeply connect with listeners. This faithfully remastered edition — handled by ambient/electronic pioneer Taylor Deupree at 12k — shines a subtle new light on this classic, reminding why the resonance of these compositions remains strong after all these years.
When asked about the origin story of Aarktica, which begins with No Solace in Sleep, founder and sole member Jon DeRosa explains, “In 1998, I went deaf in my right ear. That’s how it started.” As DeRosa struggled through self-consciousness about his impairment and disorienting auditory hallucinations, he found nightly solace in a warbly 4-track cassette recorder on which he began recording the songs that would become NSIS. “The intention was to translate this new version of sound I was experiencing into something I could make sense of,” confesses DeRosa.
The resulting No Solace in Sleep envelops the listener into DeRosa’s new sonic world, one of haunting, aquatic darkness and shimmering tonal light. DeRosa pays homage to his influences by blending them like ripples overlapping in a pond. From the gentle, unfolding echoes and crushing distortion of the opener “Glacia,” to the haunting chorale-like arrangement of “The Ice (Feels Three Feet Thick Between Us),” to the ring-modulated arpeggios of “You Have Cured a Million Ghosts From Roaming in My Head,” we can hear nods to modern classical composers like La Monte Young and Ingram Marshall as well as indie artists like Windy & Carl and Flying Saucer Attack.
The enigmatic musical appeal of No Solace in Sleep seems to arise from DeRosa’s approaching ambient music from a post-punk perspective. One can hear melodic reflections of Durutti Column or Felt submerged in the oceanic waves of distortion and delay. All the sounds are coming from a guitar and pedals (and a voice, in one instance) with no synthesizers. And yet, DeRosa’s classical background also provides a compositional framework for how these tracks unfold. It’s this merging of seemingly disparate styles into something singular and unique that makes it special.
25 years later, DeRosa’s guitar work still sounds innovative, generating tones that sound like shifting icebergs and subzero winds across a desolate tundra. And then all at once conjuring something so gentle, crystalline and comforting as a warm hearth in the midst of an ice storm. It’s a deeply affecting listening experience that continues to resonate after all these years.
+ “You Have Cured a Million Ghosts From Roaming In My Head” was featured on the soundtrack for the acclaimed documentary The Crash Reel by director Lucy Walker. The soundtrack also featured artists Chemical Brothers, Spiritualized, Tycho, Moby and The Chemical Brothers among others.
+ No Solace in Sleep was remastered by ambient/electronic pioneer Taylor Deupree at 12k
+ Aarktica’s new full-length album Ecstatic Lightsongs will be released in fall 2025
Press Clips:
Jason Morehead, Opus: Consider the vastness of Aarktica’s sounds which conjure up everything from distant arctic wildernesses and brilliant auroras to the deepest ocean depths, and straight on out to the interstellar voids.
Mass Transfer: Think of this [album] as the aural score for the aurora borealis, each note a shimmery display of color; the tones as waves of light…Simply captivating.
The Broken Face: Imagine a greatest hits mix tape consisting of the best of Windy & Carl, Stars of the Lid, Labradford and early Azusa Plane and you’re on the right track. Whispering waves of sonic molasses drip out of your speakers as De Rosa replicates the ambience of an iceberg floating through the midnight Atlantic: dark, cold and immense.
Blake Butler, All Music Guide: Over an hour of complete droning solitude, perhaps like what the auditory sense would pick up in the womb… Immaculate for executing as background or sleep-inducing, drifting off into nothing.
Bleeding Minds: A captivating musical experience that is a story without words, yet completely within the realm of human understanding…No Solace in Sleep managed to generate a feeling of serenity inside of me that no other performer ever has.
Gothic Preservation Society: There’s an unspeakable tenderness to this ponderously gentle music, like the sea who lets the sailor live just because it can. Softly ringing, echoing rhythms seem almost buried under the shifting ultramarine layers until you realize that the full ambience is no more than the dance of the individual themes. “Rapture of the deep,” the divers call it. Now I can say I’ve been there.
Reviews Editor –
From Apricot
In the stillness between ambient drone and post-rock contemplation, there exists a liminal space where silence speaks volumes and emotion flows like meltwater across frozen terrain. It’s in this elusive, glacial corridor that Aarktica’s No Solace in Sleep has lived for 25 years. Now, with a stunningly subtle remaster by ambient legend Taylor Deupree, the 2025 edition of this seminal work invites listeners once more into its serene, haunting abyss—a place where sound becomes memory, and memory becomes something beautifully unknowable.
When Aarktica‘s founder Jon DeRosa first released No Solace in Sleep in 2000, it wasn’t meant to be a bold entry into the ambient canon. It was, instead, a deeply personal act of sonic translation—an attempt to make sense of a traumatic shift in perception. After losing hearing in his right ear in 1998, DeRosa turned inward, using a modest 4-track cassette recorder to externalize the altered auditory landscape he found himself trapped within. The result was not just cathartic—it was alchemical. In trying to understand a world that had suddenly become quieter and stranger, DeRosa created something that made the rest of us feel deeply heard.
No Solace in Sleep is ambient music built not from synthesizers or software, but from raw guitar, voice, and pedalboard sorcery. The entire album is like a conversation held in hushed tones between different states of matter—ice, vapor, light. Tracks like “Glacia” and “Inebria” unfold like slow-moving glaciers, vast and indifferent but infinitely detailed if you choose to sit still and listen. “You Have Cured a Million Ghosts From Roaming in My Head” buzzes with melancholy arpeggios, like old memories rewinding and fast-forwarding all at once, caught in the machine of grief and release. And “The Ice (Feels Three Feet Thick Between Us)” echoes like a lost choir drifting beneath the surface of a frozen lake.
There is no urgency in these songs, no climactic swell—just a patient, hypnotic unraveling. DeRosa’s classical background adds structural intention to what might otherwise drift into the ether. Each track moves with the logic of a dreamscape: inexplicable, but internally true. That’s the paradox at the heart of No Solace in Sleep. It’s deeply experimental, yet it feels like it was always there—etched into the cold wind, buried under snowfall, waiting to be remembered.
On this remastered edition, Deupree preserves the original warmth of the tape hiss while adding a subtle clarity that lifts each layer just slightly closer to the surface. It’s not a dramatic transformation—it’s more like clearing the frost from a window to better see a distant, flickering light. The glistening drones shimmer more crisply. The cavernous spaces between notes seem to breathe more deeply. It’s the same record—but like all things filtered through time and memory, it’s changed in ways you feel more than you can explain.
It’s almost ironic that an album born out of hearing loss has gone on to be so sonically influential. DeRosa’s ability to coax immense emotional depth from minimalist tools paved the way for countless bedroom ambient musicians in the decades since. And yet, No Solace in Sleep still stands apart—its impact isn’t just technical; it’s spiritual. As one early listener described it, “like being in the womb.” Another said it sounded like “ice melting.” And perhaps that’s the secret: No Solace in Sleep doesn’t try to impress—it tries to feel.
The 2025 remaster also arrives with poetic timing. In a world increasingly saturated by overstimulation and algorithmic perfection, there’s something deeply radical about a record that encourages you to slow down, to breathe, to listen. Not to the noise of the world, but to what’s left unsaid—to what lingers in the silences we often fear.
No Solace in Sleep is more than a landmark in ambient and post-rock history. It’s a personal sanctuary. A sonic frost garden. A whispering mirror. And this remaster ensures that its quiet power continues to thaw new hearts, 25 years after its first breath.
If you’ve never experienced Aarktica, there’s never been a better time. If you have, this is your invitation to return. The cold hasn’t changed—but maybe you have. And in that small shift, perhaps there’s solace after all.
Reviews Editor –
From Existential
Aarktica has been hailing as a musician since long back in 2000, delivering a sonic world that’s easy to slip away into with every new release. On the 25th anniversary of Aarktica’s most popular work, No Solace In Sleep, this artist now reimagines his first ever debut with a faithful remaster. From the opening track, everything immediately feels hauntingly resonant, a drawn-out tone washing over you like the fog rolling over the horizon one morning. It’s sombre and yet peaceful, a moment where the world can’t touch it, you’re isolated and it feels like a relief. This note is built upon with further layers and distant, echoey guitar twangs, continuing to progressively evolve the longer you listen. Continuing into further songs, Aarktica slowly fades in and out of this elongated note into hazy guitar plucks that create a gorgeous dreamy palette of reverie to unwind within. Soft beats grow the sound even more, a gentle thudding that encapsulates you like you’re lost in the world for yourself. Some songs even dare to stand out with fuzziness and distortion like the static on a television and a bottled-up collection of wind itself, while others feel like ringing out bell chimes of somewhere lost in time. All of it is wholeheartedly resonant, an experience that’ll wrap you up and leave you feeling a part of nature and the world at its rawest. -Tatiana Whybrow
Reviews Editor –
From Reddit/ r/ambientmusic
For those of us who explored dreamy genres in the golden age of Last.fm, you probably remember that in the drone, ambient, and even shoegaze tags, one of the recommendations on the first pages was Aarktica, a project that, although it has had diverse sonic facets, is most often referenced for its debut album, No Solace In Sleep, a dazzling ambient experience that borders on oceans of cold and nefarious vibes.
If you’ve already listened to this album, you know what I’m talking about, but if you haven’t yet, this is the astral moment to do so. In addition to its quarter-century anniversary, Jon DeRosa, the specter behind this project, has published a remastered edition.
The new mix has a much denser aura in the layers of white noise and bass. It’s similar enough to not feel like another album, but different enough to feel like a new experience. A campaign has also been announced to release a vinyl and CD edition, which is already 50% complete.
Reviews Editor –
From Dusted
Jon DeRosa has made a lot of music over the past 28 years, and for much of that time has been known for interspersing his ambient work with surprisingly straightforwardly sung (if still lambent) songs. Rarely has he been as stylistically consistent over an LP as he was on this, his 2000 debut as Aarktica. Now remastered by Taylor Deupree for its 25th anniversary, No Solace in Sleep consists almost entirely of DeRosa’s guitar. There are some submerged rhythms here, a choral-feeling arrangement there, but otherwise it’s just endless pools of his beautifully enveloping playing. Slowly assembled at night after losing hearing in one ear, there’s a gloomy comfort to even the harshest efforts here, and even at over an hour it never wears out its welcome. It’s sneakily influential too, elements of DeRosa’s work here having been showing up not just in ambient but in goth and metal circles over the decades. The remaster brings these songs a bit further from their hissy four-track birth and the result feels even more monumental than the original. -Ian Mathers
Reviews Editor –
From Obscure Sound
A guitar-driven ambient enthrallment compels across No Solace in Sleep, the influential debut album from Aarktica, the alias of Jon DeRosa. Originally released in 2000, No Solace in Sleep was remastered this year, providing a strong reason to check out this gripping album on its 25th anniversary, regardless of whether you’re a first-time listener or simply revisiting this gem of a release, whose sounds derive solely from guitar and pedals. “In 1998, I went deaf in my right ear. That’s how it started,” DeRosa says of the album’s creative experience. “The intention was to translate this new version of sound I was experiencing into something I could make sense of.”
“Glacia” opens the album with a meditative sense of tranquility — expanding with droning resonance as swells of guitar tones resemble smoke rising gently from water. Also the album’s lengthiest track, “Glacia” proves masterful in tactfully unveiling its grippingly spacious soundscape. The ensuing “Indie” embraces more familiar guitar tones with plucky intrigue developing into a wintry effervescence past the three-minute mark, while a thumping rhythmic warmness weaves in seamlessly. “Elena” continues that sense of comforting tranquility, continuing the more sunshine-set adorations of “Indie” compared to the wintry unraveling within “Glacia.”
Elsewhere, “Inebria” feels like an ominous, ghostly procession with its whirring, wind-like chills, while “The Ice (Feels Three Feet Thick Between Us)” casts a more illuminated spell in its glimmering character. An element lingers in the background alongside that resembles a wordless vocal entrancement. Then there’s “Welcome Home,” captivating in its melodic guitar work — less vague and filter-heavy than the others preceding it, and in turn resembling a subdued post-rock slice of nostalgia. No Solace in Sleep is a fully enveloping listening experience from Aarktica. -Mike Mined
Reviews Editor –
From Igloo
Quiet-storm tape-hiss bliss-out ballads and slow-mo ice-floe ambience
The year 2000 saw Aarktica‘s debut bring post-rock perspective and a glacial sensibility to guitar-based ambient; Jon DeRosa enveloped us in ‘a new sonic world of haunting, aquatic darkness and shimmering tonal light.’ Its 25th anniversary sees a reissue, No Solace In Sleep [2025 Remaster], shed new light on this by now classic, reaffirming its enduring resonance.
The debut enchanted with its quiet-storm tape-hiss bliss-out ballads and slow-mo ice-floe ambience. One review reached for amniotic terms, feelings of both solitude and comfort evoked; another resorted to the sound of ice melting, another saying it ‘tapped directly into the heart of something older than speech’ with the depth of melancholy induced.
Background: in 1998 DeRosa went deaf in one ear; his struggles through consciousness of impairment and disorienting auditory hallucinations led to seeking nightly solace in a warbly 4-track on which recording began of what would be No Solace In Sleep; he hoped to transpose his new sound perception into something he could make sense of. Influences merged—from unspooling fragile echoes and blasts of distortion (“Glacia”) through elegiac choralesque passages (“The Ice (Feels Three Feet Thick Between Us)”) to ring-modulated arpeggios (“You Have Cured a Million Ghosts From Roaming in My Head”); nods to modern classicists, cf. La Monte Young, Ingram Marshall and avant indies, cf. Windy & Carl, Flying Saucer Attack.
Aarktica’s obscure allure stems partly from his take on Ambient—seen as if through a post-punk glass darkly; cue old Cocteaus, Felt and Durutti Column refs—signifiers of oceanic fuzz and delay; all wrought from guitar + FX (and a voice or two)—no synth. Classical background gives DeRosa a compositional sense, a blend of disparate styles into something singular fuelling NSIS‘s aura. N.B. remaster from Taylor Deupree makes a handy taster for new Aarktica LP, Ecstatic Lightsongs, due in Autumn. -Alan Lockett
Reviews Editor –
From Chain DLK
Aarktica’s No Solace in Sleep (2025 remaster) offers a hauntingly beautiful journey through ambient soundscapes, reflecting the profound personal experiences of its creator, Jon DeRosa. Originally released in 2000, this debut album emerged from DeRosa’s response to sudden hearing loss in one ear, channeling his altered perception of sound into a meditative exploration of solitude and resilience.
The remastered edition, meticulously handled by ambient pioneer Taylor Deupree, breathes new life into the album’s intricate textures. Tracks like “Glacia” and “Inebria” envelop listeners in glacial drones and subtle distortions, evoking images of drifting icebergs and vast, frozen landscapes. These compositions, crafted solely with guitar and effects, eschew traditional structures, instead unfolding as immersive sonic environments.
Critics have lauded the album’s ability to balance desolation with warmth. Moments of clarity and melodic resolution emerge amidst the ambient haze, offering glimpses of human emotion within the expansive soundscapes. This duality resonates with listeners, providing both a refuge and a mirror to their introspections.
No Solace in Sleep stands as a testament to DeRosa’s innovative approach to ambient music, blending elements of post-rock and drone to create a timeless auditory experience. Its enduring relevance is evident in the continued appreciation from both longtime fans and new listeners discovering its depths.
For those seeking an album that transcends conventional boundaries and delves into the essence of sound and emotion, No Solace in Sleep remains an essential listen. -Vito Camarretta
Reviews Editor –
From This is Darkness
The latest release on the every awesome Projekt Records label is this remaster of the wonderful 2000 album, No Solace in Sleep by Aarktica. The music here is a mellow affair, with a dreamy blissed-out feel to it, and quietly evolving ambient soundscapes. Thanks to the fantastic remaster (handled by ambient/electronic pioneer Taylor Deupree at 12k) this album sounds as incredible as it did when it was released 25 years ago, and is very much worth checking out if you like your ambient / drone to have a chilled out vibe. Marvellous! -Rich Dodgin
Reviews Editor –
From Post-Punk.com
25 Years On — Aarktica’s Debut No Solace in Sleep Drifts Like a Glacial and Cathartic Dream
In those cathartic moments of life, when we recognize our profound solitude and grapple with everything we’ve endured and must yet process, there emerges a painful yet illuminating clarity. Sleep offers little comfort; instead, we are compelled to confront our emotions directly. Yet, if we journey bravely through this cold, dark night of the soul, we find a quiet beauty awaiting us, like watching the sunrise after an endless darkness.
This sentiment permeates Aarktica’s compelling 2000 debut No Solace in Sleep, now lovingly remastered for its 25th anniversary in 2025. Jon DeRosa’s approach—glacial guitar ambience filtered through a post-rock lens—creates “a new sonic world of haunting, aquatic darkness and shimmering tonal light.” Born directly from personal adversity, DeRosa explains the project’s genesis starkly: “In 1998, I went deaf in my right ear. That’s how it started.” Struggling through disorienting auditory hallucinations, DeRosa sought nightly solace in the hiss and hum of a warbly 4-track cassette recorder, aiming to “translate this new version of sound I was experiencing into something I could make sense of.”
Upon its initial release at the dawn of the millennium, No Solace in Sleep quietly captivated listeners with its subtle grace—ambient compositions resembling half-remembered lullabies drifting slowly, almost imperceptibly, like sheets of sea ice caught by ocean currents. The headphone experience felt primordial, as if suspended in warm darkness, resonating with both solitude and subtle comfort, evoking ancient, wordless emotional landscapes. Ambient innovator Taylor Deupree’s thoughtful remaster at 12k breathes fresh life into these delicate soundscapes, reaffirming DeRosa’s talent for painting vivid auditory images—from the slow-motion ballet of glacial movements across stark tundras to the fragile yet warm solace of crystalline harmonics amid a frozen storm.
The opening track, “Glacia,” unfurls like a droning, icy sigh—an aural sunrise after a night spent entranced by the aurora borealis. Its vastness and shifting tones evoke a pristine yet desolate landscape, both comforting and chilling in equal measure. Subtle distortion and layers of feedback gradually intensify, echoing the movement of glacial ice fracturing under immense pressure.
“Indie” drifts into shoegaze territory, echoing Harold Budd’s piano sustain alongside gentle footsteps toward an elusive melody. The track feels like a contemplative journey toward a horizon perpetually out of reach, serene yet tinged with longing. The piano-like resonance merges with softly reverberating guitar textures, creating a meditative haze that lingers beautifully.
“Elena” provides a brief, romantic interlude through delicate guitar strums and subtle delays. Its tranquility gently invites introspection, softly resonating like memories whispered in quiet solitude. Gentle string noises and the slow bounce of notes add a tactile, intimate dimension, deepening the reflective mood.
The intriguingly titled “You Have Cured a Million Ghosts from Roaming in My Head” captures swirling thoughts through discordant yet cohesive guitar chimes. The dense layering mimics the calming of internal turmoil, rounding up spectral anxieties into harmonious clarity. Layers of ringing effects and harmonic overtones twist and spiral, creating a mesmerizing, hypnotic soundscape.
“Inebria” descends further into haunting desolation, ghostly wails and cold drones conjuring the isolation of deep space. It feels stark and cinematic, like watching the slow passage of stars from behind frosted glass. Low-end drones pulse beneath distorted echoes, evoking the profound silence and emptiness of an endless cosmic drift.
“The Ice (Feels Three Feet Thick Between Us)” recalls This Mortal Coil’s solemn beauty, its melancholic drones evoking choral voices trapped in a frozen cathedral. The emotional chill is palpable, underscoring a profound sense of distance and longing. A distinctly real male voice, alongside feminine vocal-like textures, deepens the sorrowful mood, creating harmonies reminiscent of a distant, ethereal choir echoing across an empty sanctuary.
With “Welcome Home,” warmth breaks through in echoing, bittersweet guitar strums, reminiscent of Cocteau Twins’ desert-night dreaminess. The song gently comforts, its layered sounds like an embrace from nature’s most solitary yet beautiful places. Textural layers of gentle distortion and reverb provide a tactile richness, enveloping the listener in gentle waves of comforting sound.
The closing “I Remember Life Above The Surface” surfaces slowly from beneath waves, sonically mirroring a whale emerging during a snowstorm. Its gradual ascent feels like recollecting a lost sense of openness, leaving listeners suspended in a poignant reverie as the album quietly fades. Crackling textures, subtle hiss, and distant, resonant wails merge to evoke a sense of fragile beauty and hopeful emergence.
Twenty-five years on, No Solace in Sleep remains a quietly monumental reflection on isolation and beauty, still whispering its solace into the void.
Reviews Editor –
From Pitch Perfect
No Solace in Sleep, the debut album by Aarktica, first came out in 2000. It was the kind of release that slipped by most people who preferred the FM dial, tucked away in the outer reaches of ambient and drone music, passed around by word of mouth or stumbled upon in the dim corners of independent record shops.
I hadn’t heard it at the time, but hearing it now in its newly remastered form, I understand why it quietly built a reputation. Jon DeRosa’s vision is sparse, glacial, and emotionally distant in a way that feels intentional. It sits in the lineage of ambient experimentalism alongside forgotten acts like Windy and Carl or Auburn Lull. There is a sense of slow-motion solitude in these recordings that makes them feel both personal and unreachable.
Listening now, the record feels even more potent. The present moment, full of constant noise and motion, gives music like this a different kind of weight. No Solace in Sleep invites stillness but never makes it easy. Everything here is stretched and blurred. Guitar is the foundation, draped in endless reverb until it becomes something vast and distant on the horizon. The textures are cold and immersive at times. You get the sense of landscapes forming in the background, dissolving before they become familiar.
Some tracks edge toward beauty, but there is always something unsettled just beneath the surface. The best ambient music refuses to comfort completely, and Aarktica understands that. At times I was reminded of Fennesz, at other times Stars of the Lid or Tim Hecker, artists who use dissonance to complicate stillness. A few pieces even had a structure that made me wonder how they would sound with a rhythm section. With just a bass line and drums, parts of the record might have tilted toward post rock or something like Radiohead’s more abstract moments. But DeRosa never follows those impulses. Instead, he builds long, slow movements that feel like walking through deep snow without knowing how far you have left to go.
One track stretches past ten minutes and feels like a slow crossing through whiteout conditions. There are no landmarks. Just atmosphere and the quiet push forward. But not everything is bleak. Here and there, small flickers of warmth surface. A clearer chord or a moment of melodic resolution. These flashes do not offer relief so much as reminders that there is something human buried in the frost.
The remaster gives the album a little more clarity without losing the haze that defines it. The cover art matches the sound completely. It is cold, distant, and slightly surreal. Like something you might see just before waking up from a dream.
I can imagine finding this on an import shelf back in the early 2000s and instantly being drawn to its mystery. It is an album that never tries to impress. Instead, it waits quietly for you to come to it. If you have spent time with artists like Windy and Carl or have wandered through the ambient minimalism of the early Kranky catalog, this will feel like an essential missing piece. No Solace in Sleep is not only worth revisiting. It is worth discovering for the first time. -Matt Jensen
Reviews Editor –
From Dancing About Architecture
Band names don’t have to mean anything; what’s a Hoobastank, and have the history books ever recorded anyone being overwhelmed by a Flux of Pink Indians? But it is nice when a band’s name and music work in step to form a sonic brand. And this is the case with Aarktica and the music on No Solace in Sleep.
If the word soundscape is often overused, by me as much as anyone, this is one of those times when the label is justified, and this gently majestic debut album, now celebrating its 25th anniversary, uses ambient drifts, drone-sonics, and coiled, structureless post-rock sounds to paint a landscape as chilled as the band name suggests. And, as the titles allude, these musical realms may be as much metaphorical as literal, and the great thing about such lyricless musical passages is that it is left up to the listener to decide what any of it means.
“Glacia” reflects the imperceptible movement of ice, transitions that are only measured in hindsight and over years rather than days. It is a formless wave of, well, hardly music at all, not in most people’s understanding, but a coming together of music as emotion, music as art, asking the age old question of just where is the divide between music and, well, not noise but whatever lies beyond song and structure.
“The Ice (Feels Three Feet Thick Between Us)” is again open to interpretation, the natural world as a metaphor for a stalled relationship perhaps, “Welcome Home” is built of shards of shimmering and ice-edged guitars, and “I Remember Life Above the Surface” echos with both the cold, abysmal depths of the ocean and the chilled wind that races over the surface above.
Aarktica reminds me of the music made by Forest Robots, a celebration in sound of the natural world, in that case, the mountains, and the wilds of California. It is elemental music that captures the beauty and strangeness of those places yet untouched by human hands.
Reviews Editor –
From Big Takeover
Undergoing an experience not unlike how Brian Eno came to his own experiments with ambient music, finding himself deaf in one ear and now hearing sound differently before, not to mention suffering auditory hallucinations, Jon DeRosa experimented with making music in an attempt to make sense of these disconcerting experiences. In that creative and therapeutic place No Solace in Sleep was born.
Twenty-five years on from this extraordinary, in the very real sense of the word, debut album, it has been remastered by ambient/electronic pioneer Taylor Deupree a process which has unlocked an even brighter, deeper, broader, and stunning sonic experience.
As the name he chose for the project suggests, this this is an album that creates a tonal painting of chilled and near-silent places: the cold embrace of the ocean depths, the bleak vistas of extreme ice-scapes, the primal emptiness of the earths remaining white wilderness, but also the stark beauty of such places largely untouched by human hands.
“Glacia” evokes the subtle sounds of nature, of ice slowly melting, of glaciers imperceptibly moving, of mountains growing, of a landscape whose evolution is measured in decades, centuries, millennia. The beguilingly titled “You Have Cured a Million Ghosts From Roaming in My Head” is a coiled and spiraling web of sounds and droning washes, and “Welcome Home” sees guitar chords turned into shimmering colors, notes dancing across our consciousness like the Northern Lights across dark, star-stabbed skies.
No Solace in Sleep could best be described as music as art, sound as emotion, and creativity to build a connection with an earlier and unspoiled world. Rather than a series of songs or tracks, this is a sonic experience, and what an experience it is. -Dave Franklin
Reviews Editor –
From Opus
Aarktica’s debut album is getting the 25th anniversary treatment from Projekt Records.
This year is the 25th anniversary of one of my all-time favorite “drone” albums, Aarktica’s No Solace in Sleep. Recorded shortly after Jon DeRosa became afflicted with hearing loss and auditory hallucinations, Aarktica’s debut is a harrowing yet stirring album of glacier-sized guitar drones, icy feedback and distortion, and ghostly effects and melodies, particularly on songs like “The Ice (Feels Three Feet Thick Between Us)” and “I Remember Life Above the Surface.”
As I wrote in my 2002 review, No Solace in Sleep is “a fascinating, sometimes beautiful, sometimes frighteningly intense world of sound.” One that, by the way, certainly belies its lo-fi origins. (DeRosa recorded the album on a 4-track cassette recorder in his college dorm room.)
At just under four minutes, “You Have Cured a Million Ghosts From Roaming in My Head” is the album’s shortest song, but it’s no less captivating as DeRosa weaves together snowflake-delicate layers of guitar in a manner that evokes Cocteau Twins’ landmark Victorialand album.
To mark the album’s anniversary, Projekt Records — which previously released Aarktica’s excellent 2023 album, Paeans — is releasing a remastered edition of No Solace in Sleep that’s now available as a digital download. DeRosa has also launched a $6,000 Kickstarter campaign to fund the release of No Solace in Sleep as a limited edition CD and double LP.
No Solace in Sleep’s 2025 remaster will be officially released on May 23, 2025 by Projekt Records but it’s currently available as a “name your price” release. -Jason Morehead