Slow Wave Sleep

Italian guitarist and soundtrack composer Emilio Larocca Conte started Slow Wave Sleep started in 2015 by in order to link sounds to stories set in a surreal world, creating instrumental music characterized by a maximalist or exaggerated take on electronic music.

A crucial shift happened in 2018, when the debut L'Ultimo Uomo has been produced in a single room in Berlin, representing the first time for Emilio singing long and complex songs combining dance, rock and classical music with lyrics in Italian. A few months later, moving back to Italy, the second album Chroma is released together with the music video of Elogio della Follia, produced thanks to a crowdfunding campaign, and a band is born to bring SWS live in clubs and festivals. In February 2019, Emilio, Gilberto, Stella and Gabriele recorded the third album live in the studio, released together by the music videos of Fiore di Loto and Garuda, an interactive video with three different endings shot by the horror movie director Maurizio Del Piccolo. However, just before the rise of the Covid-19 pandemic, the band broke up. Since then, Emilio isolated himself in his hometown for one year working relentlessly to take his production skills on the next level. The outcome are Natura Morta, a collection of remixes, and lot of new music including the EP Points, released on February 27th, the fifth full-length Spiro nell’Egosistema, released on July 14th, a bunch of singles and two new volumes of Hypnagogic.

Slow Wave Sleep aims to tell stories through a “liquid” style of music because sounds, like water, adapt the idea to any container and generate life. Although each release is a concept album, the songs have no explicit reference to the whole story. Likewise, all the music videos are linked together like a TV serie despite having their unique plot. The whole concept is about Rèfles, a fictional character who escaped on Earth from the World of Archetypes.