Heinrich Lenz
Sleep Music • Ambient • Sound Art
Concept
Fundamentals
The sleep concert is a unique concert format and an extraordinary musical experience: lasting between 8 and 12 hours, the audience spends the night at the concert venue and is invited to lie down. The guiding idea is to offer a different and deeper access to music than is usually possible in everyday life. Central to this is the hypnagogic state: the transitional phase between wakefulness and sleep, in which consciousness and the subconscious are in balance and dreams begin to merge with perception. This state, which is normally only experienced briefly during the transition, is highly receptive to artistic experiences and enables profound insights and inner exploration. The brain is highly active, and thoughts can connect in new and unexpected ways—less structured, yet often clearer than in dreams. The setting and the music of my sleep concerts are designed to reach and prolong this state, to repeatedly dip in and out of our dreams. Timeless, cathartic, challenging, deeply relaxing—sleep concerts are all of these.
Musical Concept
Sleep music serves both as a guiding star and as a backdrop for the freely flowing thoughts, dreams, and associations that emerge during the concert experience. It resembles a landscape seen from a train window—slowly and imperceptibly changing—providing orientation and grounding for thought and attention. In a delicate balance between focus and diffusion, it supports the hypnagogic state and keeps the mind hovering at the edge of wakefulness. Instruments, field recordings, and synthesizers—familiar and unfamiliar sounds—are woven into a timeless sonic landscape, alternating, blending, and transforming into one another. The unit of measurement in this music is not bars or seconds, but minutes and hours. The music dissolves the physical walls of the venue and creates a new space in which anything is possible, where imagination and perception are no longer separate.
Experiencing Sound
A hall filled with dozens of people is never completely silent. Breathing, rustling, footsteps, whispers—all these subtle sounds make us aware of the presence of others. Added to this are the sounds of the surroundings: a car passing by, rain tapping against a window, a dog barking in the distance... The music of a sleep concert is quiet enough to make room for these delicate sounds and does not regard them as disturbances, but as equal parts of the experience alongside the composed music. The sounds from the speakers and those of the space itself merge, challenging our notions of what “belongs to the music.” In this way, the sleep concert invites us to approach our acoustic environment—and even seemingly mundane noises—with new ears, to sharpen and expand our perception.
Sleeping in Community
Sleeping alone in a separate room is, historically speaking, a relatively recent phenomenon—much like the idea of an uninterrupted eight-hour night’s sleep. For the vast majority of human history, people slept communally, within family or tribal groups. The sleep concert draws closer to this fundamentally human experience. Perceiving sounds, movements, and the mere presence of other, unfamiliar people while lying down—or even sleeping—may at first feel unusual or challenging. Yet it also has a deeply calming quality and is an integral part of the sleep concert's concept. Sleep becomes more peaceful, but also lighter; brief awakenings or longer wakeful phases are not uncommon. This reflects the anthropologically “normal” sleep rhythm still observable today in communities whose lives are not governed by the clock.
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Tradition and Lineage
The sleep concert in its current form was shaped by American musician Robert Rich in the 1980s and remains deeply influenced by his musical style. However, the tradition of all-night concert or performance experiences is much older and can be found in various non-European cultures—for example, in Moroccan Gnawa music or Balinese shadow theatre. My concert format sees itself as a continuation of these traditions, integrating the techniques and perspectives of electronic and acousmatic music. Drawing inspiration from composers such as Eliane Radigue and Morten Feldman, the sleep concert creates a holistic experience of sound, space, and time.
Impressions
St. Gertrud, Cologne, 23.04.2022
Notenbank Weimar, 27.02.2019
