Nathan Harper

Named for a line from the 2004 screamo band Underoath’s song, It’s Dangerous Business Walking Out Your Front Door, Drowning in My Sleep is a mixed reality animation created at the beginning of the pandemic. It weaves digital entities into the rural landscape of Alabama, where Harper quarantined, separated from his usual studio practice. With only his cellphone, laptop, and a bad internet connection, he utilized makeshift facial motion capture to perform both songs and spoken word as copy-pasted digital characters that come together as a kind of esoteric ritual. Featuring an internet cult goddess, nightcore cowboy karaoke, megachurch Zoom evocations, and bedroom death metal noise, Drowning in My Sleep is a slow apocalyptic meditation on the egregore of the covid era internet.