Sommeil: A Concert for Sleep

Exhibition: Apr 11 2009 - Apr 12 2009
Location: Antenna Gallery, 3161 Burgundy Street, New Orleans, LA 70117

“Tanner Menard, Antenna Gallery and Experimedia Records presents Sommeil: A Concert for Sleep, an international collaborative experiment. Sommeil will be an all-night event beginning at 10:00 pm on Saturday April 11th and ending on Sunday April 12th at 7:00 am. Participants are asked to slowly fall asleep while live ambient and environmental music is performed through the night by Tanner Menard. Sommeil: A Concert for Sleep will be Menard’s reinterpretation of the sleep concert experiment, first created by Robert Rich in 1982 and will be presented at the Antenna Gallery 3161 Burgundy St New Orleans, LA 70117 in the heart of the St Claude Arts District. The concert will be realized with Rich’s permission and guidance. Sleep concerts 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. People attending the event are asked to be willing to sleep during the event or at least to remain silent during the course of the nine hour experience. Not merely a recreation of Rich’s original idea, Sommeil is a conceptual, global remix of a performance type that addresses one of the most basic functionalities of ambient and environmental sound; music by which to sleep. In the spirit of remix and the Creative Commons movement, Menard, a Louisiana native, has compiled submissions of audio material for the concert from nearly seventy artists across the globe. These artists answered a call for submissions marketed online by Experimedia Records which asked for music and field recording to be used, remixed and mashed up during this nocturnal event. Submissions include drones, found sound, recordings of natural and unnatural environments and synthetic music created on synthesizers and computers. Submitters have included radio scientists, geologists, psychologists, sound artists, musicians, composers, installation artists as well as several well known figures in the ambient music scene. During the course of the evening, Menard will remix these sleep submissions into a constantly evolving sonic texture that will lull the audience to sleep.”
Video lighting provided by VJ CHIKA.
All proceeds benefit Antenna Gallery.

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