Sleeping States, AKA Markland Starkie, is marking the decade since the release of his There The Open Spaces LP with three gigs in Glasgow, Bristol and London. To mark these, he’s given us an old song, ‘Under A Capricorn Sky’, to share.
The track has never been made available digitally before, and was originally the b-side to the ‘I Wonder’ 7" from many moons ago. You can listen to the track above and see Sleeping States play live on November 1 at the Bristol Cube, November 3 at the Glasgow Hug & Pint and November 5 at DIY Space For London.
Markland Starkie told us a little about the decision to revive Sleeping States: "I had been thinking about Sleeping States a lot last year, having pretty much wound it up back around 2011. I had a desire to revisit some of the material but without jumping all into a new album as I’m not really in the headspace to write new Sleeping States material per se. I knew the tenth anniversary of There the Open Spaces was coming up this year and I put a few feelers out to see what sort of response there’d be if I did some gigs and it was really positive. As for actually going back over the material, it’s been fun and somewhat cathartic to relearn the songs and focus on a piece of work I’m pretty proud of but hadn’t really listened to in a long time, and I hope that’s reflected in the upcoming gigs.
"As for ‘Under A Capricorn Sky’, this originally came out on a 7" as a double A-side with ‘I Wonder’ from Open Spaces, on a wonderful small-press 7" label called Caspian. I wrote it at a time I was reading a lot of science fiction and listening to a lot of American guitar music like Robbie Basho, Max Ochs and others from that Takoma Records family tree. I never had the desire (or, let’s face it, talent) to fingerpick anything like they could but it sparked an interest in the guitar as an instrument that I’d develop on the album after. The lyrics aren’t particularly science-fictiony but were an attempt to present maybe an SF-influenced tone without using classic imagery of the genre."
