Waking and sleeping: twin rivers that
always mirror each other,
that forget and remember, without end —
and carry the self both home and away.
Learning to Sleep, 2025
Learning to Sleep is a music album I released in 2025. I think of it is a landscape made of sound, word and image – while the music is entirely instrumental, I created an accompanying book that adds visualities and texts to this landscape.
The music is based on piano improvisations that turned into songs, in a phase of my life when very little made sense. The compositional phase happened when life finally became easier, and my nervous system started to calm down. The album was originally composed in 2023 (with Drambo on an iPad), and finished/released in 2025.
It consists of fifteen instrumental tracks (running time of 50 minutes).
Learning to Sleep is about sleep and sleeplessness; about twin rivers with continuous, separate, but also interconnected flows. Some sort of twisted, yet irrefutable mirror. Waking and dreaming as parts of one same, endless movement: forgetting and remembering, shifting between states of consciousness.
How does the self get carried through these states? How does it return home, to a sense of presence; and how does it drift away? What are beginnings and endings of a faded thought, tone, melody? Where does a sound begin? Where does a song end? What about sleep and being awake?
These are songs built on the idea of a fluid, eternal rhythm of being, where both sleep and wakefulness are part of the same larger journey.
I just didn’t know that back when.
I didn’t see it like that, when I suffered from sleeplessness.
The Kaleidoscope
For Learning to Sleep, I programmed a software to generate real-time kaleidoscopes from my ink drawings — the same drawings that are already used for this project’s book. They became the visual backbone of this music.
The idea of creating kaleidoscopes emerged naturally from the themes of this music: they repeat and shift, circling through familiar forms that still manage to surprise – a perfect mirror for meditation and inner work.
The Digital Book
Learning to Sleep can be bought via Bandcamp. This also includes the digital version of the 118-page book (PDF), including texts, poetry and ink drawings created by me — to create a landscape of sound, word and image.
The Physical Book
Learning to Sleep (just like its siblings Cradle and Flow) exists physically only in its limited-edition book form: color print, 20x20cm, 118 pages, perfect bound. There is no cassette, CD or vinyl for this project.
The book combines my ink drawings with poetry and texts, creating a space that exists tangibly only for those who hold the book’s limited printed edition.
The limited edition is set to 50 copies, and can be purchased for €30 (excl. shipping). Whoever buys it automatically gets the Bandcamp download (and thus also owns the digital data of the album).
Ink, Mirroring and Kaleidoscopes
I started using ink on paper in 2007, and have been creating works with it ever since. Here’s a video that ran on national television, about my “Waiting” work series.
For Learning to Sleep, I used the book’s center as mirror axis, which led to a new aesthetic based on my original ink drawings. It also led to the development of my own Kaleidoscope software, which I’ll embed here at a later point.