James Goode will present Somniloquy, an electro-acoustic interpretive musical performance exploring the influence of verbal suggestion on the dreams and hypnagogic experiences of a group of individuals.

In April of 2007, Goode asked thirteen friends and acquaintances—among them, musicians, visual artists, composers, and writers—to assist him in writing the score for the piece. This was to be done collectively, with all participants recording what they experienced while asleep or in a hypnagogic state (the transitional state between wakefulness and sleep). He provided the group with a list of fourteen phrases he had generated while at the threshold of sleep to repeat to themselves as they were drifting off, a different one for each night. Goode also participated in this process.

A portion of the dreams and hypnagogic experiences collected during this time serve as the piece’s narrative score, which was constructed to highlight the visual and thematic similarities between different people’s dreams and hypnagogic experiences taking place during the same twenty-four hour period.

Goode will conduct musicians Carrie Barclay, Dylan Bolles, Jon Fellman, Walter Funk, Rob Gillespie, Canner Mefe, Michael Henning, and Brian Relph, all of whom have been asked to interpret the dreams within the score, and to then make choices regarding how they will translate each into sound and/or music; literally, emotionally, or symbolically.

James Goode is a composer, writer, and artist living and working in San Francisco. He has produced electroacoustic works for gallery, museum, and private installations, as well as for dance, live performance, radio, recorded media, and the Internet. His idiosyncratic approach to the creation and transmogrification of sound have stimulated audiences in the United States, Canada, Australia, and Japan.

He has composed a number of pieces inspired by non-ordinary states of consciousness. Somniloquy, conceived in 2007, is one example. The narrative score for his 1999 ensemble piece Foment in the Brailles of Zoopsia references synesthesia; pareidolia; auditory, gustatory, olfactory, tactile, and visual hallucinations; multiple personality disorder; and other scientific phenomena. Spatio-sensory, an eight-channel sound installation of 2003, assigns a different sensory process to each of four pairs of speakers in the room; in this scenario, the speakers are thought of as sense organs—four eyes, two ears, one nose and one tongue—and movement of sound between them as analogous to specific types of sensory fusion.

Goode has played and/or recorded with many musicians, composers and groups, including Christopher Fleeger, Sunburned Hand of the Man, Bill Horist, Jake Rodriguez, Joshua Churchill, David Slusser, Eric Glick Rieman, Bevin Kelley, Kristin Erickson, Ji-Yoon Chun, Linda Hagood, Brenda Hutchinson, Phil Franklin, Gregg Turkington, Secret Chiefs 3, Trey Spruance, Ches Smith, John Zorn, Alan Tower, John Ingle, Tom Nunn, Jai Young Kim, William Winant, Greg Saunier, Daan Van Der Walle, and Faxed Head.

See photos from the concert.