sommeil artist profiles highlight the raw submissions used to create the sommeil sleep concert remix experiment, an installation which remixes robert rich’s sleep concert using sleep music collected from nearly 100 artists from all over the world.

Mental Health Consumer is a production alias of Brian Ruskin, a geologist and artist living in Houston, TX. Mental Health Consumer tracks run the genre spectrum from dance-oriented electro/techno to atmospheric soundscapes and ambient sonic experiments.
Brian began creating music as a child, intrigued by the interesting sounds made by hooking up cheap guitars and keyboards to effects pedals. They say that an amateur blames the equipment if the output’s bad, so Brian tried not to complain. Instead, he established a working method to embrace the limitations of obsolete technologies of proto-samplers, odds-and-end instruments and 2 or 4-track tape recording. Most importantly, a prolific output of recording during those formative years served as a dated document of where Brian was in terms of musical influence, emotional and personal state, and technical development.
Since 2002, Brian has integrated computer-based composition with live recording. The result has been a prolific stream of electronic albums under the name AViD: Advances in Obsolete Technology and more recently, greater sonic experimentation/live recording under the guise of Mental Health Consumer.
Many of these records can be heard via Brian’s netlabel, Believe In Billy Records:
http://believeinbillyrecords.googlepages.com. Recent ambient albums by Mental Healh Consumer have been released by the netlabels Experimedia (“the Measurement Spoils the Data” – EXP050: http://www.experimedia.net/index.php?main_page=free
and Clinical Archives (“Ambia” – CA247: http://clinicalarchives.blogspot.com/2009/04/ca247-mental-health-consumer-ambia.html)
The Mental Health Consumer track submitted to Tanner Menard’s April 2009 Sommeil Concert was entitled “R.E.S.T” (Restricted Environmental Stimulation Therapy).