Music for Sleep

​Forget the sounds of ASMR. Music made for the night is as immemorial as music itself and music made to help one slip into slumber is as old as the first lullaby. 

Using music as a sleep aid goes back in time as far as that of Enki, the Sumerian god of wisdom and fresh water, of trickery, mischief and magic. The word that is at the root of lullaby,  “elulam,” appears in the ancient text Enki and Ninhursag, where it say, “No singer sang an elulam there. No wailings were wailed in the city's outskirts there.” That word remains rooted in human consciousness as it morphed into the German word “einlullen” and the English word “lullaby.” The letter l in the word is one of the things that make it all so lulling.

Some folk consider lullaby to have come from a word meant to banish the demon Lilith of Judaic tradition. “Lilith-Abi” is Hebrew for “Lilith begone.” Bye and bye, it is thought that the songs sang to children at night came from these often-used words that were carved on amulets and hung on nursery walls to protect babies from the things that go bump in the night.

​Western classical music has the tradition of the nocturne, from the Latin word nocturnus meaning of the night. This type of composition came rather late in the game and first appeared in the 18th century before it had a small proliferation in the 19th when nocturnes were picked up by composers writing for solo piano. Frederic Chopin became the master of this form, and was able to distillate stillness into moving sounds. ​Later William Basinski created a mesmerizing and rich Nocturne with the bell like tonalities of a prepared piano.

​Classical Hindustani music is perhaps the most attuned to the sense of time and the passing hours of each day with specific ragas meant to be played at specific times. Without getting into the weeds, they split up the day into eight three-hour segments. A broader division is that of morning, afternoon, evening, and night, with specific times having specific charteristics that harmonize with the corresponding mood of those hours. 

In the 20th century, coming under the heavy influence of ragas and eastern music, composers like Terry Riley who inaugurated a series of his own all-night music concerts in 1967, just a few years before his journey to the east. ​Poppy Nogoods All Night Flight was an album he culled from from his all night concert series.

 Ambient music pioneer Robert Rich continued the tradition, though in a different vein, with his many sleep concerts given over the period of his career. Started while he was a student at Stanford in 1982, these seven to eight hour long concerts were done in halls where people were encouraged to bring their pillows and drift off into a somnambulant state during the concerts.

In an interview about the sleep concerts he said of the first one, “I Xeroxed a bunch of flyers and stuck them up on kiosks around campus. It was a free concert: I said “bring a sleeping bag”. I think I called it ‘Sleep Music’, and it started at 11pm and went until 8am in the morning, and it was in the lounge of the dormitory that I was living in.” Armed with a homebuilt modular and two cassette machines, Rich performed through the night to a 20-odd audience of friends, neighbours and curious passers-by: “I had a tape echo and a digital delay and a spring reverb and it was very simple, very primitive drone stuff. And very quiet.”

These became a tradition that he started to do a couple times a year, and then later he started getting asked to perform them at various venues, including the Association for Sleep and Dreaming.

For Rich these concerts, even back in the 80s, were a way to slow down, and disconnect, and get back in touch with healthier rhythms. “When you look at cultures that retain more of a ritual or a shamanic relationship to inner life, you’ll see that they are very open to sharing their dreams in the morning, to talking about the inner life. And it’s something that we have lost – it’s something that we have perhaps pushed away from ourselves as a remnant of puritanical materialism. [It’s] this strange state our culture is in where we deny inner life and we have very little use for religion, at least in the intellectual spheres, and everything is seen in these materialistic terms of functionality, and how hard can you work. I live here in Silicon Valley, where everybody brags about their 60 hour work weeks at Google and things – it’s kind of missing some fundamental aspects of human experience.”

Robert Rich released an album of sleep music in this vein, Somnium, in the 1990s which at the time was the longest running album on any format ever released. This has been a boon to his many fans who have wanted to experience a sleep concert and who didn’t have the opportunity to actually be at one. This is hypnagogic music at a very sublime level.

He has continued to perform the sleep concerts periodically, while noting they are rather taxing on him as a performer due to their long duration, something that hasn’t gotten any easier as he has aged. 

​Meanwhile Nurse With Wound, that purveyor of sinister whimsy from the mind of Steve Stapleton, took his sleep concerts in a more surrealist direction.  Stapleton’s Sleep Concerts are in more of the vein of remixing his discography into what has been called a “DJ somniliquoy,” augmented by visual projections. At a Sleep Concert for the Drogheda Arts Festival in 2014 audience members were given air mattresses, blankets, and taken to a secret sleepover location near the festival, followed by breakfast, before being shuttled back to the fest. Nurse With Wound has revisited the Sleep Concert with performances in England, Germany and Switzerland since around 2010.

The German-British protominimalist composer Max Richter explored Sleep in his music for sleep, writing eight and a half hours of music in chunks and blocks of twenty to thirty minutes. He described it as an eight hour lullaby.  A selection of these has been made available on his From Sleep album. Like Rich, he was inspired to create these works as a counterpoint to the hasty and ever driving accelerated pace of modern life. These works are more than somnolent, and can easily bring one down into the liminal places.

Sleep music as provided by a 24 hour radio station dedicated to the surrealistic needs of sleepers is something also the world is in desperate need of. The Imaginary Stations project aimed to plant those seeds in the WZZZ programs 1 and 2. 

​It seems obvious that music has long been used to protect us and envelope us in our sleep. The fringeworth interest in sleep concerts seems like something worth continued exploration, as humans will continue to need music to protect them from the terrors of the night and as a way to get off the road when life has been placed in the fast track.