 Olivier Nijs | Tanner Menard

Posts tagged:  Olivier Nijs

Sommeil photo documentation

before presenting the pictures of Sommeil i am happy to announce that the sleep concert will be taking on a life of its own beyond the april performance at antenna gallery. first, on the second weekend of july, i will be recreating the event at the ingenuity festival alongside CHiKA, jeremy bible and jason henry. i could not be more excited to perform with another group of amazing and talented experimental artists. also, in may and possibly june there will be two broadcasts of the sleep concert on www.hollowearthradio.com and http://stillstream.com. also, the release on experimedia will be forthcoming. so stay tuned for more news about the evolution of my sleep concert remix project.

finally i have been able to get all of the pictures that i took uploaded from Sommeil. the pictures begin with the gallery in its empty state as we were tearing down the last show hosted at the gallery. you will slowly see the gallery evolve into a space for sleeping.

there are some interesting photos of a latin good friday celebration that passed in front of the gallery on the friday before the event. also shown are the members of antenna gallery who were so great in helping to coordinate Sommeil. you might also note the two guys playing quartz bowls. those are josh cohen and mac. josh has developed a technique for playing quartz bowls in a spatial way. this technique creates audible binaural beats. i asked josh to play right before the sleep concert to help set the mood. the pictures of mac and he were taken during a rehearsal.

i was unable to take as many pictures as i would have liked during the actual sleep concert both because i was performing and because i felt it was a little weird to take too many pictures of sleeping people. it is a very vulnerable position for a person to be in and i wanted to make sure that i respected the sleepers.

we were able to get a pretty amazing sound with the monitors that piety st studio provided for the event. as you can see in the photos i used a trick that i learned in school in which you point your monitors up at the ceiling. it gave the impression when laying on the ground that the audio was coming from up above. i have to admit really enjoying listening to long stretches of audio from a bed that was provided me by the gallery. i was lucky enough to spend four whole days and nights in the gallery preparing for the event. all in all i have to say that it came out pretty flawlessly.

there are some pretty awesome photos of CHiKA’s videos here and there will be more photos to add to this slide show as i begin to get other photos from the curators of antenna gallery. hope you all enjoy seeing these photo’s of new art in new orleans and thanks again to everyone who contributed anything to the event.

also, here is a link to an article that was written by the art critic of the times picayune the local paper here in new orleans. http://blog.nola.com/dougmaccash/2009/04/visitors_to_the_antenna_galler.html

doug maccash writes: Antenna, one of those all-bohemian art galleries in Bywater, is celebrating its first anniversary Saturday with a sort of artistic pajama party.

Here’s how it’s supposed to work. You unroll your sleeping bag at Antenna, have a soothing cup of tea and prepare to drift off to dreamland along with however many other people can fit on the rug-strewn floor.

Then, you watch video projections of geometric patterns on the ceiling and listen to “Sommeil,” a nine-hour “concert for sleep” performed by experimental composer Tanner Menard.

Menard, 30, says he grew up in rural Vermilion Parish and studied conventional classical music composition at Louisiana State University. It was a stint as an intern at an experimental recording studio in San Francisco that turned him on to ambient music — the kind of dreamy soundscapes you hear on public radio’s “Hearts of Space.”

Menard, who moved to New Orleans in July, used the Internet to ask ambient music composers around the world to produce a piece of sleep music for the nocturnal concert he was planning. He eventually received 96 somnolent samples from Brazil to Poland to Japan to New Zealand.

Menard said the samples include environmental recordings of water, slowed down gongs, a baby cooing, city noises, and other “dense, droney” sounds. He will mix and layer the samples DJ-style during the concert, hoping to create a “giant sleep mash-up,” that will induce an “abstract and consciousness-raising experience” in his listeners.

And where better to stage an abstract and consciousness-raising experience than Antenna? Opened April 12, 2008, by a group of like-minded artists and writers (Brad Benischek, Courtney Egan, Anne Gisleson, Susan Gisleson, Shawn Hall and Case Miller), the cooperative gallery is an anything-goes alternative to the more staid commercial showplaces.

If you want to hear a nine-person poem read from a scrap wood sailboat, in a gallery scattered with apple-green broken furniture (Mark Yakich’s “Green Zone New Orleans”), Antenna is the place to do it. If you want to view heroic murals dedicated to the utopian visions of 1970s arena rock bands painted directly on the walls (Tim Hailey’s “Take a Chance on Rock and Roll LIVE!”), Antenna is the place to do that too. How about cartoons exploring the subject of cannibalism (Brad Benischek’s “Meat Vs. Dirt”)? Antenna’s the place.

Gisleson said the goal of the gallery is to foster “the culture of creativity” that she believes has been fundamental to New Orleans’ recovery. Despite the cost of keeping the doors open, the group has extended its lease for another year. Saturday’s sleep concert is a fundraiser, where patrons will pay $15 for a show during which they’re more than likely to nod off.

Menard said that “Sommeil” is not the first-ever sleep concert. He based the event on an all-nighter staged by composer Robert Rich in 1982. He plans to remain largely hidden from the prone audience during the performance, though he will peek at the sleeping crowd from time to time to better adjust the ambient musical mix. When the audience awakes it will be Easter morning. The Antenna folks predict a visit by the bunny.

If you are interested in hosting a sleep concert in your neck of the woods please contact me for details about how to make that possible. barely.audible@gmail.com