SLEEP

A naturally recurring state of mind and body

NOTES
Jason Mundok – keyboard, electronics
Daryl Snider – oboe, saxophone, recorder
Robert Diggs – narration

Recorded live at An Sibín, Tellus360, Lancaster, PA October 12, 2019

Narration source: Wikipedia article called “Sleep” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep Used under the Creative Commons license ShareAlike (CC-BY-SA)

In the late summer my band, Here Inside, booked a gig at Tellus360 in Lancaster, PA for Saturday, October 12. The show was to be held in An Sibín, a cool speakeasy listening room in the basement of the large Tellus complex that hosts multiple stages and several bars, including one of the first green rooftop decks in Lancaster. A few weeks before the show, we hadn’t secured an opening act yet, so I proposed that I perform an ambient/instrumental set to start things off. It had been quite a while since I had done such a thing and I happened to be working on some new themes for a longer piece that I’m putting together for 2020 (more on that later).

I love working with deadlines so I immediately began shaping the themes into a rough draft of a 20-30 minute set. I decided to invite my old friend and longtime collaborator, Daryl Snider, to join me on his choice of wind instruments, which gave me even more motivation to get the wheels spinning. Finally, I brought in a third element, recorded narration. The longer piece that I’m working on will include a sound collage of various voices speaking about the topic, and I wanted to test some of my creative and technical ideas. I mostly worked late at night so the topic of SLEEP emerged out of my somewhat weary writing sessions, and I decided to have my friend (and very recent collaborator) Diggs recite several sections of the Wikipedia article about Sleep. This gave me plenty of material to play with and edit into samples that could be triggered during the performance.

I finished the foundation parts with about a week to spare, which was just enough time for Daryl to generate his own ideas about the piece and for us to spend an evening working out the details and running the set a couple times. We performed the set live for a couple dozen folks in candlelit speakeasy during a lovely autumn evening in Lancaster. I hope you enjoy this experiment in music, sound, and atmosphere.