Sonic Slumber

Music and sound encompasses many different facets of human existence. It can control mood, dominate space, it can rile up, it can elicit sleep. Heinz Riegler has run the gamut of musical experience, having pushed the boundaries of rock convention with Not From There, lashed himself to a punk stricture with Nightstick. His current projects are wrapped up in ephemeral moments, site-specific experiences and personal affirmations. Spending much of the year either in the cold, isolated Austrian Alps or the volcanic basalt landscape of the Blackall Ranges, Riegler is perennially finding solace and creativity outside the box, both real and imagined.

“I've really enjoyed these experiences but they haven't come one hundred per cent easy either,” Riegler admits. “I think I'm an urban creature at heart, but I really needed to tune out a lot of noise. Not so much the city, but the internet. I love technology and I love information and I love partaking in it, but I also found my patterns become increasingly driven by that thirst for that information. I needed to reconsider how I interacted with that, and part of that was to isolate myself from it. I didn't enjoy being weaned off it at first. For the four weeks (of doing this) I was in shock. Then of course when I got to that moment of thinking that this might end, things started happening for me. Suddenly I was the most productive I had ever been in probably the last 20 years.”

Riegler's latest offering is Sleep Health, a drone exercise that wasn't really designed for mass consumption. Returning from Austria in February to collaborate with a painter friend, “I was informed immediately from a very quiet, mountainous, wintry territory to landing in the middle of summer, which in a listening kind of sense it is so insanely intense, so that was the first impression that made on me. I had some real issues trying to get some sleep, like a really hard time getting my head down and passing out. So while doing the installation work, I would start making these pieces of music designed for me to nod off to. Because of the way the studio was set up, my bed was right there, so with a Bluetooth mouse I could lay in bed and make and record things and do manipulation of sounds and processing while I was in bed. I would then put sections of it on loop and I was sort of able to sedate myself through that action. I actually dare anyone to listen to it and still be awake by the end of it. It's my most boring work to date, and I'm really into it.

“I've spent a great portion of the 2000s saying no to things, so in the last few years I've chosen to say yes and it's a remarkable thing that happens when you start doing that – you spend less time thinking and more time actually doing work; you're put into positions that you otherwise wouldn't be in. Maybe one day I'll make something really good, but maybe not, and it makes you really free. Anything is possible.”