Sleepytime
About Sleepytime from Auckland
Sleepytime aka Johannes Contag, currently living in Wellington, was born in 1972 much further north - Germany in fact, where he grew up in the servants’ quarters of a rich duke’s castle until moving to New Zealand at the tender age of 13. He’s lived in Germany since, but his prime abode has really been Dunedin, where he spent the ’90s. Here he studied music and literature and played in many-a band, most notably Cloudboy (which he remains a core member of) and electro-party sleazers Mink, but also guesting with notables like David Kilgour, Jay Clarkson, Sola Monday and the Dunedin Oneders…
An interesting development for Johannes really, because in his late teens, living in Germany for a few years, it almost looked like he was going to be a synth boffin. Early Tangerine Dream, Kraftwerk, Brian Eno, Yello and even the fearsome Jean-Michel Jarre inspired a good number of boldly atmospheric synth collaborations with a ’sequencer studio’ cohort… then TranceTechno hit the world and it became painfully obvious that bold atmospheric synthesizer compositions were just a teen fantasy - time to purge all that New Age gunk from your musical vocabulary and turn to greener pastures. Which for Johannes turned out to be Dunedin slacker pop on the one hand (some pre-grunge indie rock thrown in for good measure) and classical minimalism on the other (attempted at least; Otago University music department staff only dig Bartok and Webern). Sloppy Dunedin sounds eventually lead to the discovery of ’seminal influences’ like Can, VU and Beefheart, and by the mid-’90s minimalism had become a positive electronica direction (from The Orb to Mouse On Mars). Never having lost his enthusiasm for synths, Johannes had by now amassed a respectable collection of vintage Roland synths and various sound bending devices, and as an off-shoot of his general change in direction towards seriously lush studio production (he spent several years on Cloudboy’s Down at the End of the Garden), he returned to his atmospheric synth roots with You are Feeling Sleepy, finally realising that less really is more. This album also lead to a live ambient presence under the name of Johannes hour-length drone improvisations playing synth knobs, and, more recently, the flute. On occasion, a Casiotone, melodica, bass guitar or accordion would also appear.
Five years after You are Feeling Sleepy, another ambient concept album, Sleepytime vol.2: Schlafwandler, was thrown to the silent masses (released in early 2003). By now Johannes had survived not only life-threatening heart surgery but also the stresses of marketing Cloudboy; with a view to taking the band to the world, the group was reconceptualised as an electro-acoustic ensemble playing soundtracks alongside early NZ films (as well as psychedelia such as “Baraka”). Boldly, the group decided to embrace Europe first stop: Berlin. At the point of writing, the utopia encompasses a creative hub of musicians and technology cohabiting in a warehouse flat/studios.
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