The siren call of sleep

 About a year ago I was honoured to release a frankly beautiful album of Eric Satie pieces as interpreted by Susan Matthews.  I'd been listening to her music (via Wonderful Wooden Reasons) or some time and when at the beginning of 2012 I decided to reboot Quiet World and start featuring a wider variety of people she was one of the first people I asked.  Even though she only lived a half hours journey away we had never met and indeed only did so when she moved slightly further away.  We now meet up semi-regularly for delicious food and chat at a nice little vegetarian cafe in Carmarthen.

Well, this week she has very kindly released one of my releases - Somnia - on her own Siren Wire label.  It's a deep and dark soundscape piece that is an evocation of sleep and dream.  As a borderline insomniac I have a love / hate relationship with sleep.  I find it frustrating as it's often slightly out of reach and so when I finally hit a point where sleep is easily attainable I sleep too deeply for the dreams to surface with me leaving them as vague and indistinct sensations that can then colour the rest of day.

Somnia is an interpretation of this; the flashes of emotion, the spasms of recollection, the glimpses of essence and the phantasms of memory.

“What would an ocean be without a monster lurking in the dark? It would be like sleep without dreams.”
Werner Herzog