My Year of Rest and Relaxation

In 2021, I can say without exaggeration that I hardly slept, going through the worst period of insomnia Ive experienced. At some point that year, I read Otessa Moshfeghs novel, My Year of Rest and Relaxation. Myself and the novels protagonist were trying to get to sleep, to different extremes. The protagonist; to sleep for a year. Me; to just sleep a decent amount at some point. I was interested in the form of the novel. The section of the novel where the protagonist carried out these precise, exacting routines in their goal to sleep, mirrored my own. Though these routines resembled some pattern of normalcy, they were destructive and completely joyless. I was interested in how that could work musically. Could I write patterns of periodicity? Yes. Could I write patterns that were machine-like and without nuance? Maybe. For one of these patterns, I was inspired by Mahlers own night music of anxiety, his Nachtmusik cowbells; taken out of context from the bucolic soundworld of the `ringing bells of a grazing herd and into something with less life in them. I listened to 10-hour long videos of theta wave frequencies on YouTube in the late hours, but I kept returning to choral music, especially a certain penultimate chorus of J.S Bachs St John Passion. This chorus is what drives the majority of the piece, but it is mangled (in most parts) beyond recognition. I was interested in creating a sonic tapestry of my sleepless nights. This Bach chorus, with all its harmonic and structural clarity, when fed into my insomniac brain, became something very different. It looped and curved in the mind in very unrelaxing, unrelenting ways.