Music Spotlight: Sleap-e – New album ‘8106’

‘8106’ captures the spirit of play; the child-like instinct to pursue what you love without compromise – and here it is, that particular magic that rarely survives adulthood, remarkably intact. Each of its eleven songs is sharp, vibrant shards which, when you step back, build a mosaic of Asia Martina Morabito’s world: the growing pains of your early twenties, remaining faithful to your dreams despite the hostility of adulthood, places of escape both real and imagined – and the pulse of Bologna, her home and north star.

As a student of old-school iconoclasts like The Fall and inspired by the outsider streak of Jimmy Whispers and Daniel Johnston, it was not any particular musical quality of theirs that Asia wanted to channel in Sleap-e, but their confidence to “explode in a raw, free and authentic way.”