Asher Levitas Depicts the Horror and Humor of Sleep Paralysis on His Debut Solo LP

For most of his music-making career, Asher Levitas has lived in shadows. The 30-year-old London-based producer came to prominence around the start of the decade as part of Old Apparatus, a production crew who favored dark, otherworldly ambient-leaning compositions and album covers filled with abstract silhouettes. The three members didn't do interviews at first, and once they started doing them they refused to be named—largely choosing to offer collective answers, but eventually allowing Fact to number their responses, in order to distinguish between them.

They'd later adopt pseudonyms—Harem, LTO, and A Levitas—as they released the solo EPs that'd later be collected in the compellingly confounding Compendium. Even Levitas' moniker, which was a shortening of his birth name, carried with it an air of mystery. His debut solo LP, Lit Harness—out June 10 on Planet Mu—comes under his proper name, though it's bathed in the same sort of twilight that's marked his work to date. There's stuttering percussion, pin-pricks of brittle synth work, and a general sense of creeping dread that'd make his old bandmates proud. This time, however, it's not for the sake of mystery, but to give a closer look into Levitas' life than ever before.

Since his late teens, Levitas has suffered from bouts of sleep paralysis, an interruption in normal sleep processes during which a person feels conscious but can't react normally to the environment. It sets in most frequently when he's already been sleeping poorly, or when he's consumed any substance that might have the same effect. When he's headed to bed under these circumstances, hallucinations set in. Rather than suffer the stereotypical nighttime immobilization, Levitas sees creatures moving in the corners of his room, puppies slipping under the door, clouds of smoke hovering above his bed, or other specters from the day that have sneakily maneuvered into his dream-like states. "It can be incredibly frightening," he says on a recent Skype call. "I started watching The Walking Dead the other day, and that wasn't a good idea."

Lit Harness, Levitas explains, is meant to mirror the surreality of this phenomenon. It is, for example, both terrifying and hilarious that one might suddenly see a pineapple in one's bedroom. Drawing on his education in sound design at the London College of Communication, Levitas uses ambient passages and deconstructed dancefloor tracks with the intent of echoing his experiences, bringing to bear both the darkness and the light in one of the year's most strangely endearing records. Levitas took some time recently to explain how sleep paralysis—as well as the deaths of his grandparents during the course of making the album—informed the uniquely unsettled atmosphere of the record. Check that out below alongside a premiere of the album standout "Strongest Bonds."

*THUMP:Tell me a bit about your experiences with sleep paralysis—how long have you experienced it?*
Asher Levitas: The symptoms you get with sleep paralysis can be quite broad. Sometimes I get the thing where I'm trapped in and can't move, but [usually] I hallucinate. The first time I was conscious of having it—I reckon I was like 19—could have turned out really, really horribly for me. I'd gone out drinking and I was with my girlfriend at the time. We blacked out, and when I woke up and in the middle of the night I hallucinated that she was a man in my bed and I couldn't find my girlfriend. I was just looking at this man and wondering, "Where's my girlfriend gone?" I was just about to punch this guy in the face when I came through and realized, "Oh my god, it's her." That was incredibly shocking.

Is there anything that seems to trigger it?
When you read about these problems, they're generally to do with stress and anxiety and stuff. But I've had a lot of them when my sleep is disrupted—like when I've taken drinks or drugs. I've had quite a few after festivals where I wake up in the middle of the night and there's people setting up a campsite in my bedroom and I have to ask them politely to leave. It's much more likely to happen to you if you're not a particularly good sleeper anyway.

What is coming out of that experience like? I imagine it has to be pretty intense to return to reality.
I see lots of old imagery about sleep paralysis and it's always [depicted as] demons. I have had witches and weird things, but sometimes it's literally a cute animal or a pineapple or something. Sometimes it's like slowly waking up from a nice dream, and sometimes it's really scary. If it's a really scary one, you wake up in fear. Cold, sweaty—in shock, basically. But there's funny ones, too.

Is sleep paralysis still something you deal with to this day?
I realize it quicker now. It happens so quickly that you don't get to enjoy it. If you paid to have that experience and it lasted a bit longer, it could be a really amazing thing. But as it is, sleep paralysis isn't the best thing to deal with. I'm learning to deal with it and relax a bit more, have regular sleeping patterns. I've always been interested in different realms of reality—what's real and what isn't—so it's cool to have these brief and surreal glimpses at something like that.

I'm curious about how you reflected these experiences on the album, because there's a lot of moments that are pretty light and airy in addition to the more noisy parts.
My dreams, as well as these episodes of sleep paralysis—they've definitely molded me and what I've been drawn to. But I went through quite a strange time with things going on in my family; there was a lot of emotion and sadness and pain over the last two years. My grandparents on my father's side died. I was quite close to them. They looked after me a bit while I was growing up, and I was around them a lot for their last few years. My grandmother was 101 when she died. And my granddad was like 96. They died a few days apart. As soon as my granddad died, my grandmom was like, "Alright, see you later," basically.

Death is definitely a focus to the record as well. I was going to put some sort of dedication to my grandparents on it. But I realized that the figure [on the cover] looks too much like a dead zombie, and it was weird having a dedication to someone who's just died with a zombie figure next to their names; it didn't really work. Writing typical songs about [things] isn't my nature, so I'm crossing two different worlds: [capturing] the dreamlike phase and trying to hone in on these feelings. I consciously made a few more tracks that had a little hope and peace and serenity, to show that there's a light inside somewhere.

Colin Joyce is THUMP's Managing Editor. You can find him on Twitter.