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 landscape made of sound, word and image. It’s based on piano improvisations that turned into songs, when my nervous system started to calm down; with one melody evolving into another, one chord flowing into the next passage – like a dream, forever shifting. Originally composed in 2023 with Drambo on an iPad, I finished the songs in 2025.
The fifteen instrumental tracks (running time of 50 minutes) are complemented by a 118 page book combining my ink drawings with poetry and texts, creating a space that exists tangibly only for those who hold the book’s limited printed edition.
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 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 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.