L.A. Times Staff: Best music to help you fall asleep
When the “sleep and meditation” service Calm launched its app seven years ago, the company was largely focused on the meditation half of its offerings. A few years ago, though, says Michael Acton Smith, co-founder and co-CEO of Calm, it began to notice a sharp spike in traffic every evening between 10:30 and 11 p.m. Bedtime.
“People had been using white noise or Netflix or podcasts to help them sleep. Now they were using our meditations,” Smith concluded, and so the company began commissioning what it calls “stories” — breathy, soothing, grown-up bedtime tales with a feather bed of tinkling music beneath the murmured words. The stories, sometimes read by velvet-throated thespians such as Matthew McConaughey and Stephen Fry, still didn’t satisfy the demand of Calm’s blearyeyed followers, who (quietly) clamored for just the musical beds, unencumbered by voices, words or other triggers of our daily grind.
Today, the “sleep” tab on Calm features exclusive hourlong compositions from alt-rock instrumental stars Moby and Sigur Ros, among soporific New Agey playlists like “Chasing Wonder,” “Healing Piano” and “Sleep Like a Baby.” All told, its tracks have been streamed more than 200 million times to date. Calm is currently valued at $1 billion, and, says Smith, “sleep” has become the most popular part of the app.
With more than 52 million downloads, Calm is the leader among a number of like-minded wellness apps, themselves just a sliver of the booming sleep aid industry, which is expected to be worth more than $100 billion in 2023 (think everything from CPAP machines to Ambien to weighted blankets). We’re living through a bull market for the anxiety economy, and when sleep won’t take, many of us turn to some form of white noise, hoping that the bleeps and bloops and lapping waves blot out our inner chatter.
Streaming services such as Spotify and Apple Music have been a godsend to insomniacs who turn to music to help them doze; their infinite loops of tranquilizing sound baths mean no more being jostled from slumber by the end of a CD (or quietly panicking that the disc is halfway over and you’ve been grinding your teeth for 20 minutes). The “sleep” category on Spotify has dozens of popular playlists to choose from, with heavy-lidded titles such as “Peaceful Piano” (5.4 million followers) and “Nightstorms” (not be confused with “Night Rain”).
Most of the tracks composing such playlists are ambient to the extreme, the kind of burbling sonic woo-woo that might accompany your full-moon detoxification at an Ojai spa. For those restless souls who may be seeking something more closely resembling music qua music, but still with the lulling repetition needed to help the Sandman enter, we asked our music writers to share their most cherished audio benzos, the songs and soundtracks they use to drift away after a late night of concert-going and then some. Their selections lean toward the branch of instrumental art music known as minimalism, but nerdy or not, they’re certified sleep-worthy and, unlike the real benzos, have no known side effects. melancholy, repetitive compositions from the ‘80s, realized that the act of playing the dusty, decaying tapes led to their destruction. The musical results were interesting and unexpected, and he let them play out to their demise.
Shortly after the New York composer finished, however, planes struck the World Trade Center, and the tapes became an artifact of the devastated emotions from that time and place (especially when accompanied with footage of the eerie aftermath in the Manhattan skyline, taken from Basinski’s roof). Art, like everything else, can collapse and vanish.
Nearly two decades later, the loops still have a lulling, meditative quality. (They received a loving and comprehensive 2012 reissue on the experimental label Temporary Residence. But honestly, getting up and flipping vinyl jolts the experience, so maybe stream it first.) For all the shock of their origin myth, these compositions have a hypnotic way of bending time. Not much happens as far as melody or dynamics — the changes in tone and mood are slow and sometimes imperceptible. But put one on in a dark room and an hour passes in an instant. The dissolution of the music mirrors the mind drifting away into sleep. How strange that music so bound with trauma could end up bringing so much peace and rest. Lord knows we need it now.
— August Brown