WELLINGTON artist Rhian Sheehan makes music that he says ‘sounds like a slice of nirvana’.
Not the band, but the Buddhist concept of a state of being free from suffering and weighty thought.
However, Sheehan doesn’t meditate in the conventional way.
“I should, but I meditate in other ways, not with music, music is more like an affliction … I watch high definition films, I would say HD is my form of meditation,” he laughs.
Sheehan hopes to amplify the “contemplative and escapist” aspects of his album Standing In Silence at The Opera House, by launching a tour de force of moving imagery and sound.
The album, Sheehan explains, is about searching for peace in the hectic city life. The feeling of standing alone in a city of 30 million people gave him the inspiration to make Standing In Silence.
While travelling Sheehan was blindsided by the size and scope of mega cities like Mumbai, Tokyo, and Madrid.
“They are so full of people; it’s like walking into another world. I threw that into the music with a sense of wonder,” he says.
Producing Standing In Silence was like “reverse engineering a soundtrack” for the show he is putting on at The Opera House. Normally you would see what the show looks like first and make a score to match, he says.
“The Opera House certainly caters to the musical sonic I want to achieve because you need room for it to work.”
The show will include a large visual element, something Sheehan has never done on this scale before. A friend of his travelled through Asia to capture imagery especially for the event.
“Because it is a studio album we have to turn it into something dynamic and alive, so the physical elements of city life are there, the bus stop, the sound scape, it’s all real,” says Sheehan.
He has only played one Standing In Silence show before, at Downstage Theatre last year.
Sheehan makes his bread and butter crafting commercial soundtracks, and recently composed the score for We are Astronomers, a space dome film narrated by Dr Who’s David Tennant. The film is currently reaching audiences at planetariums throughout the world.
“The coolest thing is Dr Who narrates for it. Dr Who used to petrify me and every time I saw the scenes with Daleks it scared the heebie-jeebies out of me,” laughs Sheehan.
Thoughts of the unknown have always fascinated him and he finds it astounding how many people stop looking at the bigger picture.
“It’s like they walk around in this two dimensional world, but little do they know we are spinning around a burning ball of hydrogen on this speck of rock. I think about that a lot.”
Sheehan will be accompanied by 15 musicians and a backdrop of moving images shot all over the world.
Standing in Silence: Rhian Sheehan and guests, The Opera House, June 19