The wind blows the sounds away. It's foggy. Beads of dew glisten on the leaves. Outside, in the small tool shed the light is still on. The ocean is not far away. At the place where Florida pours into the sea Ben Cooper has recorded a second album together with Alex Kane. And they worked again in the same shed at Jacksonville Beach, and in Alex's Bedroom. Concentration and contemplation: over thirteen months they recorded what Ben Cooper calls a »middle of the night record,« his »twelve pop songs about dreams and nightmares.« Dreams and nightmares is what »Sleep Well« is about. And that although »Ghost« – the debut of Ben Cooper's alter ego Radical Face released in 2007 – has already become a ghost album. It is this shadowy and inscrutable atmosphere, these border landscapes of our existence that the 26-year-old deals with. It's foggy and the wind passes the sounds over to us.
»Ghost« was an intimate, pensive songwriter album. With »Sleep Well« Ben Cooper is back in his Electric President outfit. Even if the hard contrasts of Electric President's self-titled debut in 2006, this eruptive euphoria, have become rare. Maybe Ben Cooper has listened to the ocean this time more precisely. A ›flowing album‹, that's what he wanted to create. And the result sounds very British from time to time: when the songs disappear into echo spirals, when Cooper's voice - one of his giant talents – gradually disappears from the microphone until it nearly sounds a little ghostly. »Now this ain't my home, there's no warmth in these bones.«
»Ether«, the song these lines stem form, is a metamorphosis in the tradition of Franz Kafka or Orson Welles. And a typical Ben-Cooper-pop-song, hymnal but never theatrical. »Monster«, at the very beginning, forms sounds into a landscape, a soundscape into that the melodies sparkle. »Graves and The Infinite Arm« mirrors the album's topics maybe best, within the sounds, dark, melancholy, a gothic novel.
»Everything was produced with the idea of it sounding like nothing is entirely grounded«, that's what Ben Cooper says himself about »Sleep Well«. It's foggy. The wind blows the sounds away. And us with them.
