It is 10am on a weekday and Rhian Sheehan is asleep. Those who have listened to his latest album might think that's rather fitting given Standing in Silence offers 14 tracks of dreamlike quality. Is this how he conjures the muse?
Perhaps. But the key reason the songwriter turned sonic experimentalist has been allowed to remain in bed is because he only put head to pillow some three and a-half hours earlier. Yes, at 6.30am. Thus his wife's offer to wake him is declined, the interview postponed for a few hours. Sheehan's music might be far removed from REM, but he needs some just the same.
It's after lunch now. Sheehan, relatively well rested, is on the line from his Wellington home and is explaining the lie-in, much of which has to do with a relationship between time and space. In Sheehan's case, time is a looming deadline and space the subject. He has been commissioned by the British National Space Centre to write a soundtrack for a new film, which will screen at seven planetariums there.
The project has been put together in Sheehan's attic studio, where he often heads. A full-time composer, Sheenan has lots of musical gadgetry. However, the space soundtrack will be mixed elsewhere, in 5:1 surround-sound. He says he finds it "hard enough dealing with stereo".
The 14-part Standing in Silence suggests otherwise. Slap on a pair of headphones and be prepared to be whisked off to some ambient otherworld where the voices of hundreds of Indian shoppers merge with a child's music box, where weird guitar sounds (courtesy of Jakob member Jeff Boyle) hurtle to and fro like the shadows of clouds and where rhythm is subservient to texture.
It's four and a half-years since Sheehan's last original album, Tiny Blue Biosphere, and plenty has changed: he says he has fallen out with downbeat electronica, the genre he explored on Tiny Blue Biosphere and Paradigm Shift, the 2001 debut album which, with its mix of acoustic guitar and electronic beats, brought him to the attention of many.
"In the early 2000s, that was when chill-out music was cool. When my first album came out in 2001 I think I got caught up in that world, which was kind of a bad thing, because you shouldn't write music as one genre. I've never really got that.
"I felt I became too . . . café-esque, too contrived and predictable," Sheehan explains. "I approached this album in a filmic way. I'm a big movie soundtrack buff. I wanted to create something that was transcendent, I guess, almost understated, without any in-your-face melodies, though I guess there are a couple."
At the risk of judging a book, or album, by its cover, the artwork of Standing in Silence says a lot. Featuring a photograph of a man surveying his surroundings amid a smog-filled landscape, it's a metaphor for Sheehan's quiet, introspective music.
"It's a photo that I took when my wife and I were in India . . . of a guy standing on a hill. He was only there for about five seconds but I popped over a hill and took that photo.
"When I got back to New Zealand, I kept looking at that photo and it seemed to signify something. He was probably thinking about what he was going to have for dinner or something, but it's the idea of someone standing there and really taking it in and contemplating everything - whether it's the state of the world or his own inner strengths."
Sheehan likes to travel. Recent destinations have included Japan, Spain and India. He also likes to record sounds from the places and spaces he has been, be they a shopping mall, a bustling city street or a quiet bedroom.
"I field-record quite a bit and a lot of the time I'll get back and listen to these recordings and try to remember what it was like to be in those places, like Tokyo, a megacity. I think the music comes from trying to translate the feeling of being in those places into an audio language.
"When we were in India I collected some very Indian sounds and fell in love with that, so I came back and wanted to put that kind of flavour on some of the tracks, but it didn't work. I think all the 14 tracks speak to each other and if you put something like that in . . . I don't know; it just conjures up images of music that is part of a genre. I was trying to be more experimental with this album."
The lengths Sheehan will go to in his musical experiments indicate there is something of a perfectionist at work. A key melody that anchors the early parts of Standing in Silence was provided by his 8-year-old daughter's music box.
"I think she had a little music box that played What A Wonderful World. I tinkered with it, put some contact microphones on it, unscrewed it and did lots of things to it and chucked it through a computer program and came up with my own melody. I guess I was deconstructing something then reconstructing it into something else - much to my daughter's despair.
"Females who listen to the album seem to enjoy those elements, but a lot of men I've talked to find them creepy. The music box, to some people, can sound like something from a horror film, but to others it's the most beautiful sound you could hear."
Though Sheehan now regards his studio as his main instrument, it hasn't always been that way. Born in Nelson, raised in Wellington, he headed to the University of Canterbury where he was introduced to computer music in his early 20s. Back then, he was a bit of a gun on the guitar.
"I used to play in a duo called the Alchemy Duo with a guy called Jolyon Mulholland, who now plays in Gasoline Cowboy and the Mots. We were quite serious about it. We toured all over Australia and had help from [acclaimed guitarist] Tommy Emmanuel. We were playing that finger-picking stuff, with a bassline and melody going at the same time, so I'd like to think I was quite accomplished back then. I can still lay down a cracking version of Man In The Mirror.
"I'm just not good at writing on the acoustic guitar anymore," the 33-year-old says. "The ideas don't seem to spring to me as much. I don't sit down with a melody. It usually comes through trial and error. I probably write one good track for every 10 crappy ideas.
"It's tricky writing ambient music because you have to be quite disciplined about how far you go. You can always get carried away and put more textures in there but you really have to be quite restrained.
"Some people have said the album is quite 'samey'; that they can't tell the difference. Perhaps that's because it's not blatant; there aren't lots of strong beats."
Agreed: Standing in Silence is not an album to barbecue to. It's music best left until later.
"I'd like people to have a nice glass of red wine on an evening, turn the lights off and just drift off."
