Shortly after engaging with the Deep Sleep / Third Eye Chakra / 432Hz / Binaural Beats video from Phi Tribe, it doesn’t take very long to understand why this act has brought in as many views to their content as they have in the past year. Uploaded a mere nine months ago and already attaining well over six million views, music engineer Laura Ford’s Phi Tribe project presents listeners with the kind of aural experience that cannot be found in music adorned with big beats and charismatic vocal harmonies.
Lyricism is replaced with the conceptualism of true ambiance in this performance, giving us insight into the connection between humanity and sonic depth like few other recordings can afford. This is not a work of ego nor mysticism per se, although there’s an argument to be made that both have something to do with the immense power of the material we’re listening to. Heady bass tones make love to a synthesized backdrop in this track, which can barely be defined by such a simple term, and rather than trying to impress us with virtuosity, this music is made to lull us into a peace that has become far too fleeting in 2023.
Rather than embarking on a sonic journey with a physical element guiding us through the darkness, the very absence of any real physicality in this mix is perhaps what makes the deep sleep music so entrancing from start to finish. Even when preparing some notes for this review, I couldn’t help but fall under the hypnotizing spell of the content just after a few minutes of listening to this eight-hour opus.
As we’re warned with the title card at the start of the video, this is not something you should listen to when operating any sort of machinery, heavy or otherwise, and I think it would be smart for most listeners to already be lying in bed around the time they press play on any of this material, sleep-oriented or otherwise. This is the kind of music that was meant to receive our complete attention, and this alone tethers its legacy to some of the most iconic sounds ever produced outside of the radio format so many of us are used to in our daily lives.
Phi Tribe’s buzz is hard to get away from in the YouTube community right now if you follow black-screen ambient works, and I don’t have any issue with their share of the spotlight at all after giving some of their extended discography a closer listen here. There’s no getting around the mammoth tonal decadence of a piece that envelops us in third-eye chakra-style conceptualism, but this is all the more impossible to argue with when listening to something as well stacked as what we’re getting from Phi Tribe. Whether you’re normally the type of listener to go for this or not, I think it would be a good call to see what all the fuss is about before the winter season is concluded.
Clay Burton