Bundanon art museum is an unlikely place for a nap. But this was actively encouraged at a recent performance of Sleep Cycle, a new project by acclaimed Australian jazz bassist and composer Claire Cross.
The museum accurately described Sleep Cycle as “seamlessly inhabit[ing] the worlds of ambient music, free jazz and minimalism with a score informed by graphs of human brain waves recorded during the various phases of sleep”. We were there, nestled into the landscape along the Shoalhaven River, to review the experience.
There are 30-odd stretcher beds that are quickly occupied by eager guests, and another 30-or so people sitting up in chairs in the main gallery of the museum, and we are surrounded by Boyd’s evocative landscapes from the 1980s depicting the landscape from right outside the building, the familiar shapes of the Shoalhaven river and escarpment in a series capturing different times of day from dawn to midnight.
Music and sleep are fascinatingly intertwined. This project is reminiscent of Max Richter’s epic 8-hour lullaby, Sleep that was performed overnight in the Sydney Opera House in 2018, with the audience on camp beds and broadcast live on the ABC. I didn’t manage to score tickets so I participated from my sofa.
Here at Bundanon, Claire and her two performance colleagues, who are also acclaimed improvisers, the trumpeter/effects maestro Reuben Lewis and drummer Kyrie Anderson, take up their places on a dimly-lit “stage” with silent, still bodies all around. Claire was an artist-in-residence at Bundanon in 2022 and has returned for a visit from her base in Berlin.
Electronic sounds reminiscent of a dialup internet meld with the trumpet, hooked up to technology that adds real-time effects like reverb, sampling and echoes along with atmospheric drumming and pulsing bass guitar.
A ringing that could be the bells over a shop door, or maybe a bicycle bell, a familiar yet disparate ringing, tinkling and overlapping pulsing. It’s not a beat in a musical sense or even a heartbeat, more like the flutter of an eyelid or a pulsing vein. It’s like a hypnagogic audial hallucination that is sustained with textural changes in pressure and density and pitch, some car honking, a fire drill, maybe an old rotary phone and a white noise machine. I am fascinated with the hypnagogic state, the moments between wakefulness and sleep where logic is released. Benjamin Franklin, Salvador Dali and Richard Feynman are among those reported to have tried to harness the mind in this state.
The sounds transition slowly, sometimes hollow, sometimes bordering on piercing then sliding into trance. I feel my eyes transfixed by the paintings’ slashes of sky and reflection of sky that in my altered brain-state seem to border the edges of the music, reflecting the soundscape and landscape intersecting in this place at this time.
There’s hardly any fidgeting from the beds. Most people are so still in the dim ambient light of the galley, lulled by a solid beat on a tom with a gentle sound of distant traffic. The sounds transition again, with theremin-like wah-wahs and and lengthening pulses that feel more inside my head than out.
About 30 minutes into the performance, a reclining audience member emits a loud snore which wakes him up. The sounds from the performance are underwater and ethereal, wave-like followed by footsteps in the attic, thumping somewhere real yet unreal in the liminal spaces. I wonder if it’s the bass guitar or computer effects generating a gentle whump. A low hum is mirrored by a woman’s voice an octave up like an ohm meditation, it’s breathy and nasal like a monk and vibrating on the palette.
The drum kit starts up a clattering that disrupts the hum, closed cymbals and snare with gently increasing intensity and the sounds morph into the energy of experimental jazz with all instrumentalists playing together. The bed folk start wiggling as the jazz intensifies with a performance that would be right at home in a Berlin or Chicago jazz bar in the wee hours of the morning… and they wind down and wrap up as the audience slowly realises that it’s over and start to applaud.
Claire thanked her fellow performers, and acknowledged the audience participation of the snorers, then signed some album covers for a couple of fans! A recording of this project can be yours on vinyl.
It’s performances like these that really showcase the breadth and variety of artists who are granted a residency at Bundanon, and the exceptional projects they create. If you haven’t already signed up to the art museum’s newsletter, I highly recommend you do it right now.
