Sound alone, fixed, 2004.

Losing it….losing it…close your eyes. Close your eyes! …
Sleep… sleep – you’re losing it, losing it.
Trying to smudge that white line of consciousness.
Aching to fall… into oblivion.
Trapped in limbo between sleep and the desire to sleep.
Frozen beyond waking.
Half dead…half still, half awake? Not whole.
Can’t stop thinking, can’t stop remembering this cruel parade of itchy embarrassments, scratching away beneath blank eyes.
There is too much noise for rest, there is too much sight for blindness.
Sleep now, before it’s too late – morning’s manic birds are gouging you into wakefulness.
Sleep. You’re losing it…

This text/sound piece about insomnia and a nightmarish mental state has been performed in various ways, from a live four-channel mix in a club in Vancouver to a fixed media performance over a 60-speaker system at the International Computer Music Conference in Belfast. The work is made from transformed voice (mine), noise and environmental recordings of an English dawn chorus. I made a related work for oboe, percussion and digital sound, Insomnia, composed for New Noise, and recorded on their CD, Insomniac