Hubl Greiner and I (Jean Detheux) came together through our respective work with Stepanida Borisova, a fabulous shaman singer from the Siberian Sakha Republic.
Hubl was working on his "Hulu Project," its "TranceSiberia" segment done with Stepanida, and I was working with Thierry Van Roy, on his magnificent "Taïga Maya" saga (with Melanie Gabriel), in which Stepanida also plays a major role.
These "coincidences" led Hubl, Stepanida, Roman Bunka, Mohamed Badawi and I to doing a "shamanic music" concert in Beirut, Lebanon, during the "2008 Al Bustan Festival."
Hubl was kind enough to like the visual material I had prepared for that concert, and felt that those images would be suitable for his new album, "Inemuri."
From the moment I tested the images with his superb music, I was hooked, and that led to an intense period of work, trying to serve Hubl's and Luigi Archetti's music, while using, as source material, many photos taken by my son when he was not yet 8 years old, photos of the farm and area, in rural Ontario, where we lived at the time.
A few of the remaining photos were taken in Siberia by Thierry Van Roy, even less were taken by me, also mostly in rural Ontario and in Montréal.

The premise of "Inemuri" is very close to much of my work on perception ("what do I see before knowing what it is I am looking at?"), this shifting between "awake" and "asleep" states, between "reality" (whatever that is) and "dream."
I now understand better why these images, which worked well with the shamanic music performance (shifting between "real" and "magical") were felt by Hubl and Luigi to be equally at home in "Inemuri."

The film is dedicated to Fernand Bélanger.
Fernand was a film director who acted as editor of my first National Film Board of Canada film, "Liaisons" (2005).
Memories of our conversations on "making time visible" and "film time" came up very often during the making of "Inemuri."

Here are Hubl's notes on his musical project:

"Inemuri"

Fragile sounds soake through the waking-sleeping senses of the passengers in a subway car somewhere in Japan, blending in with the ambient rhythms and creating the daywalking world of inemuri.

"Be present and sleep at the same time" – Inemuri is the art of taking a nap anywhere and anytime. Wedged into the crowd on the subway, sitting at the bar in a restaurant, or even during important business conferences: In Japan, the sight of people holding short and refreshing naps is anything but out of the common.

A motorbike is speeding through a quiet and peaceful residential district: Often, sound is not just sound. The driver just loves the sound of his machine, the residents are merely bugged by the noise. This is a well-known psycho-acoustic correlation. What is much less known is the fact that the driver´s perception of the environment is totally different from that of the residents due to mysterious phenomenons of overlaying and influencing.

So, what will happen when you sleep in public? How does the sleeper perceive the sounds that surround him, how do these sounds change in connection with the cognitive deprivation caused by his sleep, his dreams?

On their album "Inemuri", the HULU PROJECT uses bizarre rhythms and fragile sound fabrics, sometimes interspersed by melodic fragments played by a guitar or a mandolin, to describe this condition between dream, reality and publicness. Atmospheric, meditative, wild and fractured – a trip for the senses! Minimalistic impressions burst upon atonal electronic ambience, breath-taking collages collide with heavily rocking industrial riffs.

The boundary between sound and noise becomes blurred: a discoursive relationship The sound paintings are like multi-layered sonorous architectural fabrics. The art of advanced listening – rangy, minimalistic, and of a refreshing slowness.
(Hubl Greiner)