The Music That Keeps Us Awake At Night – Insomnio

Delirious dreams, waking up terrified in the middle of the night… Utrecht’s ensemble Insomnio performs a programme full of surreal, weird music on the border between dream and reality, with works by Gérard Grisey and Gaudeamus Award nominated Nicholas Morrish and Kelley Sheehan.

In the traces that remain by Nicholas Morrish four phonographs rustle and crackle ominously, whilst the ensemble brings to life forgotten sounds and instruments, such as the Stroh violin (a mechanically amplified violin). Violins and cellos scrape and scratch across tables like nails on a blackboard in Kelley Sheehan’s Four Sharp Corners. And in the music of Gérard Grisey the listener wanders around among rarefied, sometimes frightening sounds, as in a Lynchian feverish dream.