oslepenikoncem

Wondering about planning creativity with premeditated and accidental events, designing envelopes over longer and shorter times, eliminating unwanted noise and glitches, living with endurance and breakdowns, dropping in and out, seeing laziness and energy, keeping up attention span while forgetting, how evolution and bifurcations or choices in nature and in our imagination clouds immediate actions, are there memories without history, and are we mere anecdotes looking forward or back, where are the rhythms?

The longest piece I have actively listened to was probably La Monte Young's Well-Tuned Piano, which lasted 7, 8 or maybe 9 hours. Can't remember anymore since it was probably 30 years ago or more, somewhere in Germany, can't remember even where. Maybe around that time a friend took me to the village where she was born, around Easter time, near Murcia. There happened to be an annual traditional ritual called Noche de los Tambores. A crowd of drummers of all ages started banging loud from noon till the next day, ending late in the afternoon. For everyone it was all about endurance, children almost falling asleep on the spot while banging a can, and when looking aside I saw the hands of one of the musicians bleeding. But I never listened to the entire 15h Der Ring des Nibelungen cycle by Richard Wagner in one go. Though I listened to a very long piece by Morton Feldman, long ago in Middelburg, but actually I cannot remember how long that lasted. There must be more… And now you will come up with John Cage's organ piece ASLSP that lasts 639 years, but I haven't listened to it yet, though eventually the years will run out.

One of the techniques to “stay on the job” is a training in bi- to polyphased or segmented sleep, like done before by politicians, soldiers, cosmo- and astronauts, solo sailors, artists and scientists. Buckminster Fuller, Napoleon and Churchill, Leonardo da Vinci or Tesla, they all did it. And when we were babies we were all doing it as well. Monophased sleep seems to have taken over recently, probably due to the industrial and office timeschedules. Each can find a comfortable polyphased sleep schedule while the idea is not to limit the hours of sleep. Salvador Dali, but also Thomas Edison and Alexander the Great were doing a different thing, by trying to wake up in the N1 stages of sleep, creating dreamlike movements which combine the last awake experiences with related memories and wandering thoughts. But that is a different idea.

In our case, to create a 22 hour performance, if each of us would be phased differently, we could guarantee that minimum trios, quartets, or even sextets to happen without additional fatigue symptoms while playing. Over the last years, the following schedule seemed comfortable and allowed an efficient working/creating schedule: first an early 3-hour sleep till 1 am followed by being awake for 2 hours, then another 4-hour sleep often interrupted by a maximal 1 hour awake period, provided a minimal half an hour siesta is enjoyed after lunch. But let each and all find their own relaxed phased timings.. sure a sleep based time fragmented composition can be made out of this. Various Artists, the artist has been experimenting with this for years, and is living in a tri-phased sleep existence, and promised to enlighten, train us a little in the coming months.

Let's start to think about phased/segmented sleep as an experiential compositional structure within the work, parallel to the sounds of nature, varying over day and night continuously, which would be a compositional structure for the work, finally superimposed with interpretations of sounds from several geolocations with (non)human instruments, which could be the augmented result of both structures…

Stringed options / sound layers that we build kaleidoscopic patterns from:

• Guy: Sleep Rhythms (4 hours awake, 1/2 hour asleep), adapting to alternate patterns
• Kirsten: ›open mike‹ to thought and communication processes (talking and making sound/music in parallel)
• Golo: Reveal and highly disciplined archive sounds and play them
• Guy/Golo: Play songs from all times — Songs by Los Dos from 2017 etc.
• Guy: Take up very basic concepts of playing pipes, strings, plates, membranes, bodies etc.
• Golo: Find the basic concepts of pipes etc. in radio history and discuss or play with them
• Golo: Play with radio’s extremely strict time patterns and material from AM & Shortwave archives, online archives and own radio recordings, questioning their relation to naturality