Hi Mick! I am so glad that we can finally look forward to a second Sleeping Pulse album. Let us celebrate this with an interview. How are you doing?
Hi Vera! I’m doing well. 2026 has been a good year so far, a much better year than 2025 which was pretty devastating for me as I lost my Mum halfway through recording the album. That was a life-changing event that really ripped my heart out. Losing her was always one of my biggest fears. I told Luis that I couldn’t sing for a while, I just couldn’t do anything. Buddhism got me through it, little bits of Buddhist logic here and there. Thank God for that. By the time I got back into recording the vocals for the album I had a hard time singing the songs I had written about mortality, about holding onto memories, about seeing a dead loved one in a dream. It was quite a raw time but I’m through it now. It’s nearly a year now and I’ve come through the other side of it. But yeah, Luis did a great job of keeping the albums recording going while I disintegrated. And here we are, it will be released on June 5th. Things are back on the up. I have lots of work to be getting on with. I’m busy, I’m healthy. Everybody I know is healthy, and I’ll be a Grandfather in a few days time. The universe takes with one hand and gives with the other.

The debut album ‘Under The Same Sky’ came out in 2014 and I thought it had a great reception, so what happened for real after its release, so that the project seem to disappear in the haze for most people?
We always planned for Sleeping Pulse to be an ongoing project, but after the release of the debut album things just conspired to get in the way. For a long time Luis was predisposed with his other band Painted Black and their second album, and because of that it actually took 3 and a half years for me to receive any new Sleeping Pulse music from him. And during that time I was caught in the massive gravitational pull of Antimatter with ‘The Judas Table’, the live DVD and two singles ‘Welcome To The Machine’ and ‘Too Late’.

Nevertheless it seems that the music on the album started its own life on digital platforms, bridges the gap of years in time, isn’t it? From time to time people kept asking for it… How did you both experience that?
I was keeping an eye on how it was doing on Spotify from time to time, and it was really strange. Here was this single album that was never toured, never followed up by a second album, never promoted past its original release, and yet the monthly listeners were going up and up. I really cant explain it. Obviously it found its way into peoples hearts very organically.

Well, since 12 years have gone by since this debut, let us introduce Sleeping Pulse again. People should know that you are the moving spirit of Antimatter, but how and when did you ever meet Luis and how did it turn into cooperation?
I can trace the formation of Sleeping Pulse back to a specific date. It was September 21st, 2008. I had met Luis for the very first time only the day before after playing a show in Lisbon, and here he was playing me a piece of instrumental music (the very one that would go on to be ‘The Blind Lead the Blind’). I loved it, asked what his plans were and was very happy to hear that his recent attempt to work with a female vocalist had fallen through leaving him still in need of a lyricist/vocalist/vocal composer. And so began our working relationship. It’s strange to think that Sleeping Pulse was forged after knowing each other for less than 24 hours. It would, however, take another 6 years before our debut album ‘Under The Same Sky’ was released, which highlights how much of an incredibly slow-moving creature the project is. And, of course, this album was no exception.

I think the main difference with Antimatter is that you only focus on vocal lines, arrangements and lyrics in Sleeping Pulse and the musical side is from Luis. Do I interpret that right or is it slightly too rough and limited thinking when I put it that way?
Yeah that’s basically it. That’s how we worked together from the start, Luis takes care of the music and instrumentation. On this album there were a couple of minor things I contributed, like the flute solo for ‘Rise’, which was more of an accident, really. I had put it there as a placeholder in the demo with the idea that a flautist would simply record their own solo. But I guess that Luis got a severe case of ‘Demo Fever’ and couldn’t imagine the middle of the song any other way and asked the flautist to perform the demo melody. But yeah, Luis writes the music, and the general lines are drawn with Sleeping Pulse, we don’t step on each others ground. And that’s not out of an aggressive territorial thing, its just that we both respect and trust the other person to do their job well. So that can feel strange for me sometimes as I’m a musician. But then I had the opportunity to roll my sleeves up and get involved quite heavily in the music for the bonus disc on the 2-cd artbook version. That was great. really liberating. The chains were off and I recorded an 80s-tinged electro remix for ‘The Constraint’ amongst other things.

How and when did you both pick up the thread again, starting to think about new material? Was there something that happened which ignited the flame or what?
It was actually Covid19 that was the major catalyst. By 2018 I had received only 3 partial pieces of music from Luis and I had done work on them all, so the genesis of the album was there, but by this time I had to focus all my attention on the Antimatter album ‘Black Market Enlightenment’ and an accompanying documentary and tour. Once that was over I was ready to work on Sleeping Pulse again, but then Antimatters 20th anniversary was looming. It was like one project or another wouldn’t get out of our way. Then along came Covid 19 and just wiped everything off the calendar. The planned 20th anniversary tour was postponed. The ensuing global lockdowns were actually the perfect opportunity for us to both be free at the same time with literally nothing else to distract us. I became obsessed with the Sleeping Pulse demos (especially the track ‘Rise’)

Since you are in Liverpool and Luis in Portugal… actually, how do you write the songs?
We work remotely, we always have. In Antimatter I work alone in my studio and Luis does the same with Painted Black, so its absolutely no inconvenience for us to work alone on our separate parts for Sleeping Pulse. We actually prefer it that way. From time to time I may ask for very minute changes in the arrangement of his music to conform to the song that is forming in my head. Luis has no problem doing that. We do have a bit of back and forth, but our way of working is very easy and convenient for us both.

Is this a collection of songs penned through the years or did they all come into being in a fairly short and compressed time?
Through the years. Luis would send me a new piece every 6-9 months or so and I would get to work on it. It was probably a six year period that everything came together. Strangely, as I get older, that doesn’t seem like such a long time anymore …

I remember I heard of a second album being in the making already some time ago… a year ago I think. Has it been delayed for some reason at a certain point in time?
It wasn’t delayed, it’s just that we just work so slow together. We’re both very measured in our approach. Everything is analysed and considered.

Let us shine a light on some of the songs. What leaps to the eye is the longest track ‘Extrasolar’. That sounds spacey and universe-like, let’s say it comforts my urge for escapism in music haha., but what I was wondering: what is it about with that spoken word sample and slightly otherworldly touch? Can you go a bit deeper into the lyrics and music?
Luis had made this sprawling, progressive track with a space theme and once I heard it I knew I had to pull out all the stops in terms of figuring out the concept and lyrical approach in order to compliment the epic piece of music he had created. His original demo was complete with everything you hear, the full instrumentation and arrangement, the violins at the climax and a placeholder spoken part. I had to keep my lyrics (and rewrite the spoken part) in frame with the overall concept of the album, ‘Dreams & Limitations’, and after some soul searching I wrote the song about mans search for knowledge, the question of God, life beyond Earth and also what philosophy calls ‘The Hard Problem’ of consciousness all wrapped up into one rather fruitless journey out of our solar system and beyond all physical boundaries. The kind of thinking that used to get me into deep trouble when I was a more psychedelic person decades ago.