Sleep in the Shadow of the Alternator (2025)

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About Sleep in the Shadow of the Alternator | Album Credits | Press Quotes

About Sleep in the Shadow of the Alternator

Release date: 8th August 2025 (Library of Nothing Records)

A radiophonic lullaby for a half-forgotten place and time, Sleep in the Shadow of the Alternator comprises close-miked spoken word, framed by slowly revolving harmonies, intense drones that evoke the hum of electricity, enigmatic field recordings, shimmering bells and the distant rumble of metal percussion.

"The mines were still operational when I was a child. Coal gave its name to the town. The whole area was defined by heavy industry: quarries and monumental factories. Yet, we were also surrounded by beautiful woodland, windswept grassland and outcrops of ancient rock. Eventually, the industrial economy was extinguished. The warehouses were demolished. The pits reverted to nature. 40 years later, I recall my memories of the place as if they were a dream."—Leo Chadburn

The album unfolds across four tracks, reflecting the changing seasons. Its labyrinthine narrative takes imagery of the landscape as a starting point to explore ideas of absence, return, melancholy and magic, culminating in a science-fiction vision of a post-human England, one thousand years in the future.

File alongside: Eliane Radigue, Robert Ashley, Delia Derbyshire, Derek Jarman.

Click here to read the lyrics.

Album Credits

The words and music are written, performed and produced by Leo Chadburn.

Leo plays bass drum, bass recorder, bowed vibraphone, cymbals, glockenspiel, harmonica, harmonium, prepared piano (fishing line, neodymium magnets and neoprene), shortwave radio, tam-tam, thundersheet, wine glasses, and synthesisers by Casio, Roland and Vermona.

George Barton plays glass chimes on “Magic Flora of the East Midlands”.

Mixed by Jamie Hamilton and Leo Chadburn.

Mastered by Sean McCann.

The creation of Sleep in the Shadow of the Alternator was supported by Help Musicians.

Press for Sleep in the Shadow of the Alternator

"...Sleep in the Shadow of the Alternator is powered by his narration, words murmured into a microphone like the latest of late night radio: the spirit of Chris Morris' Blue Jam and Delia Derbyshire's Inventions for Radio. Around his soft, insistent voice, layers of sound rise and fall... His narrative is full of glorious, casual images that make a powerful poetry ...The stranger and more psychedelic the setting, the calmer Chadburn's words become. By this point, we are fully committed to his world and re-emerging is a shock. Sleep in the Shadow of the Alternator is a perfectly realised work, and visionary triumph."
—Tom Bolton, The Quietus, 5 August 2025

"...Magical realism meets spoken-word memoir on this riveting new album.."
—Alan Pedder, The Needle Drop, 8 August 2025

"...Sleep In The Shadow Of The Alternator is an important document, a deeply respectful set of audio postcards moving between the past and the future, assuming considerable emotional weight..."
—Ben Hogwood, musicOMH, 8 August 2025

"...If you can't go anywhere on vacation this Summer, this will take you on a journey through the theatre of the mind..."
—Outside Noise on YouTube, 13 August 2025