Cyrilla Strothers Project, 2004-2006  photograph by Charlie White

Music for Sleeping Children is out now. It's free. You can listen to it here. There're two people behind it (well, a lot more than two) but the artists mostly responsible for it are Charlie White (you may have heard of him) and Boom Bip (Bryan Hollon and you may have heard of him too). You can read about the concept at the website.

Or you can read it here, since I've copied and pasted it in its entirety.

Music for Sleeping Children is an experimental collaboration between internationally recognized visual artist Charlie White and Mercury-nominated musician and producer Boom Bip (also known as Bryan Hollon). The project stems from White's investigations of the representation of American adolescence, and was born from a relationship forged between White and Hollon in 2009 when they collaborated on "We Like to Shop," a simple clap-along song from White's experimental cartoon, OMG BFF LOL that Hollon converted into a throbbing club track for the work's US premier at the Aldrich Museum. From there, White and Hollon set out to realize a far more ambitious project conceived by White as the marriage of in-depth teen interviews, discussions, and studio projects with pop, electronica, hip hop and experimental composition. Working in tandem, White and Hollon fashioned the concept of each track around the original studio recordings of teen girls ranging in age from 12 to 16. From eager enthusiasms, to exuberant chants, to adolescent melancholia, Music for Sleeping Children underscores the complex tensions resonant in the teen voices while transforming each girl into a popular music form of her own. Magical, uncomfortable, and original, Music for Sleeping Children is an artwork, an archive, and an album.

So how exactly does the cutting up of long form interviews (White interviewed each of the girls—Sabrina, Georgia, Isabelle, Bailey, and Mik & Mel—for three hours each) and setting their voices to music bear on the "representation" of white "American adolescence" and what exactly does this "bearing" have on us, the listener? 

But if we ask this question, we ought to be accurate. Because we aren't so much engaging in actual "representation" as we are listening to the act of listening (and representation) itself. For one, we have to hear what White hears—the meter, the rhythm, the sadness, the humor—in the girls' voices, and two, we are hearing the way Boom Bip hears what White hears; the music becomes a literal and figurative record of transmission, the way experience (or lack of experience) becomes the impetus for representation. And I suppose it's at this level—say, like the white wall built in situ for the museum and presented as the art itself—that the teenage girl (from very near the Valley) assumes a sort of profundity for the artist, for the audience—though these two terms likewise become hopelessly confused in the process.  

The music itself reminds one of Walter Benjamin, his predilection for the small affects of daily life. For example, one tune uses coin flashes from a videogame soundtrack while another employs the horns of a marching band. Bip uses the mundane warmth of these familiar sounds (including disco basslines and drum beats) to create an atmosphere of a latent emerging sadness—albeit the inverted and wry knowing sort of sadness of consumer culture in general. At one point, one of the girls remarks marriage won't be so bad because you'll finally have someone to eat pizza with.

And this is the strange dynamic at the center of the work. The subjects are themselves "asleep," which enables them to fully embrace the logic of a late consumer culture while seeming like its nascent critiques. Hence their subjectivity becomes markings of a sort of absence of the real (underscored by the music), while the perspective of adults (it is fitting White interviewed the girls from the producer's booth while they sat in what was like a confessional, behind a curtain, unseen by White and their parental accompaniment) narrows or becomes lost. And what is lost in the transaction (between White and the girls, between White's vision and Bip's music), we essentially recover, the way one does a past through archival footage or perhaps the covers of magazines--through cultural detritus. This is wholly material and so fascinates our gazes—or in this case our ears.

But I'm not quite doing the concept justice—just as Bip's dance/pop may not justly represent the speaker (what does it mean to make Georgia's tale about popularity by far the catchiest track?). But doing justice to something isn't the same as representing something. To wonder at the disjunction is perhaps a better way of going about it. 

Music for Sleeping Children is now available for download at the website. Each song is accompanied with a video. You can preorder a limited edition vinyl at the Lex Records shop, to be released 1/21/2013. There will be only five hundred copies available. Get on it.