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Music to Fall Asleep To

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No, this isn’t an Americana thread, I’m talking about music that you listen to when you want to relax, slow down the old pulse rate, and who knows, even have a snooze. Perhaps I’m getting old, perhaps I’m getting stressed, but I’m finding that I’m enjoying listening to stuff like Ambient Electronica and Thunderstorms (that is recordings of actual thunderstorms, not the NWOBHM band; they’re shite) when I need to relax or clear my thoughts.

For example, I really like Marconi Union. You may remember that they were in the news a couple of years back because the world’s top scientists and boffins had determined that their track “Weightless” was scientifically proven to be the optimum music to send you to sleep. I think it was to do with the frequencies and pulsed rhythms. Anyway, it’s great stuff. But i want to find some more. So what are your recommendations? Recordings of Appalachian rainfall? Balinese Gamelan music? The Cocteau Twins?

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Comments

    • That’s pretty good. It’s a bit uptempo mind isn’t it? You can imagine Ralf Hutter listening to this when he’s out cycling at night. Probably on one of those fixed gear things. With no lights.

  5. I love Marconi Union but for me anything with regular beats is only going to keep me awake. Eno’s ambient music – drifting and looping so that you can’t latch on, is what you need. Discreet music is the piece I can listen to – or rather, not listen to – over and over –

  6. Let Jeff sooth ya to sleep with his Sleep Tapes. Haven’t tried sleeping to ’em, but I do love pottering around the house listening to ’em on headphones. They mostly just make me laugh a lot. i’m guessing they’d work quite well to send ya to a good night’s sleep (with vivid dreams!) Can’t think of owt better than The Dude lulling ya to the land o’ nod. Ambient sounds provided by the guy who did the True Detective background noises I read somewheres. For a good cause too.
    http://www.dreamingwithjeff.com/#music-section

    • Me too…never tried going to sleep with it because I never have any trouble falling asleep, but I sometimes play it if I need me some Dude. Not recommended for the car, though.

  8. Pat Metheny – What’s It All About
    Harold Budd – The White Arcades
    Budd/Eno – The Plateaux of Mirror
    Eno – Music for Airports
    Robin Guthrie – Bordeaux
    Nils Frahm – Screws
    The Dead Texan – The Dead Texan
    Susuma Yokota – Sakura
    David Sylvian – Gone To Earth
    Stomu Yamash’ta – In
    Ry Cooder – Paris Texas soundtrack
    Michael Hedges – Aerial Boundaries
    Six Organs of Admittance – For Octavio Paz
    Chopin – Nocturnes
    Debussy – Piano Works
    John Dowland – Book of Songs
    July Skies – The English Cold

  9. I have just the thing for you. back in the late seventies, Zappa used a keyboard player who went by the none-more-new-wave name of Chuck Wild. he’d previously been in a moderately successful LA new wave act. Anyway. After playing with Zappa (and not because of playing with Zappa) he had a bit of a personal crisis – I think connected to coming out – and consequently changed his life and music. He need to calm himself down, basically, so started recording VSM (“Very Slow Music”, genre fans) under the equally daft and off-putting name of Liquid Mind. So far, so uninteresting. No way anybody but a holistic reiki healer from Santa Barbara is going to buy a disc by something called Liquid Mind, right?

    And that’s where you, the poor slob desirious of a bit of a kip, loses out. Just because you can’t get over smirking at his unhappy choice of nomenclature. It is funny, though. tell you what – let’s have a bit of a lol right now, and get it out of ours systems!

    LOL!

    Okay. Amongst his oeuvre (Fr. for “egg”) “Sleep” is perhaps his masterpiece. Like all his music, it’s beat-free. Vast chordal waves of music. But it’s not aural wallpaper; there are themes, progressions, different voicings, ripples … there’s a lot going on, but it’s all happening with one design, to lull you to sleep. And it works. A few years back, when I was having trouble getting to sleep and got sick (lidrally) of sleeping pills, I tried this, and with a little help from me (you have to meet it half way, no good lying there and grinding your mental gears about your woes) it worked, again and again. I don’t think I ever heard the end of the CD.

    Back when you could, I contacted him by email and we had a bit of a correspondence. A good guy, but like any Californian (except Zappa), totally irony-free. Maybe you have to be to make music like this.

    • Is this it?

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImNn7e9y6K0

      The first few minutes do indeed suggest it will have a soporifico-relaxational, chillmungous, tranquilizzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

          • Sorry H.P. I’ve been meaning to thank you. I downloaded Sleep from eMusic last night, so you’ve provided Chuck with at least one new customer. Maybe Archie as well when he wakes up!

              • I’m sure it will, thanks. I should probably point out that I’m not actually insomniac, I’m just interesting in having more music to help me both relax and concentrate, though they may seem contradictory. I will sometimes put on headphones at work when I need to concentrate, and I find that Marconi Union works a lot better than AC/DC. Thing is, I have more stuff in my collection that sounds like AC/DC than Marconi Union. Hence I’m grateful for the great recommendations from yourself and the others on this thread. There’s great stuff here.

    • That is indeed soothing in the extreme. I’m experimenting with working to it at the moment (except of course i’m not actually working at the minute). Could go either way. Mind you, with the right equipment I reckon I could knock something like that up in, oh, 8 hours – but I didn’t, so well done him.

  10. Can’t do it. Can’t read while music is playing either. I’ve no idea how tired I would need to be to fall asleep to music because I’ve never stayed up late enough to find out.

  11. Jordan de la Sierra – “Gymnosphere: Song of the Rose”

    This is one of my favourite ambient piano albums of all time.
    Originally released in 1977. From the San Francisco area.
    Double CD Reissued by Numero Group records in 2014.
    What a corker!

  13. There is, of course, Matt Berry’s Music for Insomniacs which is actually too interesting to be a true aid to sleep, but relaxing all the same – and lovely to boot.

  14. Podcasts, an hour long recording of falling rain and thunder, Brian Eno’s Kites – I almost always play something, principally because my tinnitus gets worse in the evening, and these are often called upon.

    • Which falling rain recordings do you listen to Gatz? I’m fascinated by these, maybe because I grew up on the north east coast of Scotland. I love listening to the rain outside, it’s like those cakes for that French writer.

      • I’m not sure. I downloaded it from a site that offered free nature sounds to fall asleep too ( I had gone looking for exactly that) and chose that one because it was an hour long. I haven’t been able to find it again, though I’ve looked.

        If you’re interested pm me and I’ll send you a copy or find somewhere to upload it and send you a link if the file is too big. It was offered free in the first place so I doubt that would upset anyone. I’m on holiday at the moment but should be able to sort it out at the weekend if you like.

      • Why not record your own sleep track?
        I stuck a pair of microphones out of my kitchen window one rainy evening in about 2006 and made a minidisc recording. It turned out rather good, I think. Rainfall, a bit of thunder, a few cars swishing along my road, a distant train clattering…
        An 80 minute disc. Works pretty well if I’m having trouble sleeping.

        The Headphone Commute podcasts generally work for me too, although the occasional one is verging on dance music and completely unsuitable. The Framework and Framework Afield podcasts from Resonance FM are mostly pretty good. For the most part they consist of field recordings from all sorts of sources which have been edited into soundscapes.

        Usually I have no trouble at all getting to sleep, although I rarely sleep much more than 5 hours at a time unless I’m ill.

        • A bit off-topic, but it reminds me of something I did in Oxford. I walked the city centre recording a typically busy and noisy Saturday, and played the tape back on my Walkman when I made exactly the same walk on a very empty and quiet night. Far out, man. Some moments were genuinely spooky.

  16. As someone who sleeps to music, all night every night, my favourites are:

    David Sylvian – Flux & Mutability
    Brian Eno – Ambient 2
    Harold Budd and Brian Eno – The Pearl
    Dustin O’ Halloran – Lumiere
    Matt Berry – Music For Insomniacs
    Plus a mix of tracks from the soundtracks to Betty Blue and The Big Blue.

  18. Back when I was depressed I used to nap in the afternoons. I found that Gorecki’s 3rd would do the trick. If you don’t know it, the first movement is just strings playing an endless but somehow cyclic staircase of slow chords. It fades in slooowly for about 10 minutes then imperceptibly fades out slowwwwwly…. I don’t believe I ever made it to the end conscius conshus awake .

    • Ah, Gorecki’s Third…. or, as it’s otherwise know “The Symphony of Sorrowful Songs”. Concerning itself mainly with life in the Warsaw Ghetto, the horrors of war and the separation of parent and child. I have to admit it’s floated through my mind a couple of times this week during some of the more depressing news broadcasts.

      You take an afternoon nap to this? Proof positive, if proof were needed, that you’re a truly evil bastard. You probably wake up chuckling and everything.

  19. I listen to loads of this kind of stuff – love it , especially good for when Im working from home where I cant deal with vocals as too distracting. The Marconi Union album is great. Other recommendations from me would be:

    Winged Victory For The Sullen – eponymous first album
    Stars of the Lid – And Their Refinement of the Decline
    Hakon Stene – Lush Laments For Lazy Mammal
    The Album Leaf – Forward / Return
    Nils Frahm – Solo which contains possibly the most beautiful thing Ive heard this year

    Ho

    • I love the first two records on your list, Feedback, which makes me very curious to hear the other three!

      I also give the thumbs-up to:

      Winged Victory For The Sullen – Atomos
      Stars of the Lid – The Tired Sounds of

  21. I rarely have any trouble sleeping (So why am I still up then? Well, I dislike that sleep is robbing me of precious night time, so when I don’t have to work the next day I tend to stay up until morning…) but if I ever developed insomnia I’d stick on a DVD of an underwater nature documentary, that’s the only kind of noise that will knock me out immediately at any time. I tried unsuccessfully to watch the BBC docu series about life in the oceans some years ago – fell asleep within five minutes every week!
    I guess it brings me back to the lazy days back in the womb or something…
    For the same reason the only film I’ve ever fallen asleep to at the cinema was the Connery Bond film “Thunderball”, and yes, it happened during the underwater harpoon fight.

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