Call for Submissions: Sommeil: A Concert for Sleep

February 4, 2009

Our Friend Tanner Menard from New Orleans is curating a very interesting event and your contributions are needed. Read below.

Call for Submissions:

Sommeil: A Concert for Sleep

In early April I will be reinterpreting the sleep concert experiment, first created by Robert Rich in 1982, at a well established gallery in New Orleans, Louisiana. I am doing so with Rich’s permission and guidance. Sleep concerts as presented by Rich are all night events in which the audience is asked to attend the concert with a sleeping bag and pillow and to fall asleep while a slowly unfolding sonic texture evolves over the course of the night and into the morning. This concert will begin at 10 pm and end at 7 am with tea and breakfast.

Not merely a recreation of Rich’s original idea, Sommeil will be a global reinterpretation of a performance type that addresses one of the most basic functionalities of ambient sound, music by which to sleep. One might call this sort of cultural reshuffling a conceptual remix. In the spirit of remix and the Creative Commons movement, I am looking for submissions of audio material for the concert. This is an opportunity for artists from all parts of the globe to help shape the next generation of sleep concerts. Experimedia Records has generously agreed to release material submitted on its net label under a Creative Commons license.

I am interested in the following: field recordings of natural and man-made phenomena, unprocessed recordings of musical instruments, drones, room ambience, strangely tuned string recordings and any other sonic matter that will somehow enhance a glacially ambient landscape of sleep music. All submissions should in some way be appropriate for an audience that will be sleeping.

The concert will be 9 hours of uninterrupted music. All audio submissions may be highly altered through various processors, looped, rearranged algorithmically and otherwise manipulated through digital means. Basically, I want to create a giant sleepy ambient mash up in honor of one of the fathers of ambient music. It is also my hope that this concert introduces the people of New Orleans to the incredibly creative music of ambient and experimental artists that are flourishing all over the world, often unbeknownst to the general populace.

Release of the material will either be in a compilation of short remixes or in large scale remixes from multiple audio sources. Your material will be credited both at the concert in program notes and on the release that Experimedia has graciously agreed to publish. All releases will in some way reflect how your sonic matter was presented at the live sleep concert.

I plan to blog extensively about this multifaceted performance/collaboration. Please contact me personally at barely.audible@gmail.com or by searching for Tanner Menard on facebook. If you have any questions please feel free to contact me. I would love to get to know everyone who contributes material and would love to blog about the audio matter that you submit, previous or future releases of your music and anything else that might help in promoting your art.

The deadline for submissions is March 12th 2009.

Special thanks to Robert Rich, Jeremy Bible, Experimedia, Shawn Hall and Antenna Gallery

To learn more about Robert Rich’s original sleep concert experiments please visit

http://www.downloadplatform.com/album.php?...rt+Rich+Somnium

“The first hour or two will be slightly more active than the rest, but soon the music will drop away into slow foggy textures and strange ambient sounds. At low volumes, these textures can blend into your acoustic environment, creating a sort of sonic dislocation, a re-focusing of your perceptions. You can use the sound texture as a way to focus your attention onto images that arise out of your half-sleeping mind. In the transitions between sleep and wake, hypnogogic images may become intensified and more vivid. You may also become more aware of dreams, and you can observe the different layers of perception as you teeter on the edge of consciousness”…Robert Rich