Music for Sleeping Children is a PUBLIC EP, artwork, and archive that will be offered for free in its entirety at musicforsleepingchildren.com

Stemming from White’s long-term study of the representation of American adolescence, the project was born from the relationship forged during White and Hollon’s 2009 collaboration 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 with pop, electronica, house, and experimental composition.

Working in tandem, White and Hollon transformed immersive interviews with teen girls into carefully designed narrative dance tracks. Each track of Music for Sleeping Childrencaptures the essence of a different teen girl, from the privileged and popular sixteen-year-old “Georgia” musing on the importance of being liked, to the sultry and complicated fifteen-year-old “Isabelle” recalling her melancholy crushes of freshman year, to the neurotic and impatient sixteen-year-old “Sabrina” planning her life down to the last detail while fearing failure at every turn.

White’s Music for Sleeping Children photographs are a selection from his CYRILLA STROTHERS PROJECT, 2004–2006—an intensive two-year study of an American teen girl living in the isolated suburbs of southern California. The project generated over eleven thousand images, which White edited down to an archive of 50 photographs to be published in 2024, twenty years after the project began. However, for MFSC he will present 12 of these works to complement the EP’s aesthetic and cultural tone.

ABOUT CHARLIE WHITE:

Charlie White is a visual artist working primarily in photography and film. His works have exhibited internationally in museums such as the Shanghai Museum of Contemporary Art; Oberösterreichisches Landesumuseum, Linz; the Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York; and the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. White’s film, American Minor, was an official selection for both the 2009 Sundance Film Festival and the 2009 Director’s Fortnight at the Cannes Film Festival. Numerous monographs of White’s work have been published; his most recent, American Minor, published in 2009 by JRP | Ringier, brings together over five years of research, archives, personal collections, and artwork related to his study of adolescent image in America. White’s works have ranged from meticulously produced narrative photographs that investigate the nature of the individual, popular culture, and American history, to clinical studies of adolescent subjects, collections and archives of teen girl ephemera, and precise film studies of the American teen.  White’s work is currently on view in “The Sun and Other Stars” at LACMA until October 14^th.

ABOUT BOOM BIP:

Boom Bip is a DJ, producer, and musician whose skills have ranged from deep house, techno, hip hop, electronica and trance, to sonic experimentation, rock, and new psychedelia. Fearless in his range, Boom Bip (also known as Bryan Hollon) has ventured into new territories, collaborations, and experimental projects throughout his career. From his earliest releases with rapper Doseone, to working with master DJ John Peel, who heralded their first Peel Session as a “modern day Captain Beefheart”, to his lauded solo albums, and his Mercury-nominated collaboration with Gruff Rhys (with whom he formed Neon Neon), Hollon has fashioned a modern style of sound of incredible breadth and reach. Most recently, Boom Bip released Zig Zaj, an expansive solo album that includes tracks with Luke Steele of Empire of the Sun, Alex Kapranos of Franz Ferdinand, and Josh Klinghoffer of the Red Hot Chili Peppers.