From ‘Deep Focus’ to ‘Deep Sleep’
I’ve spent much of the last three years exhausted. I had always been a sensitive sleeper and a “night owl” — late nights studying in undergrad and years of pounding the pavement going to concerts. And yet, I still found it startling when that propensity for burning the midnight oil shifted to full-blown insomnia.
I tried what felt like every remedy. Peppermint tea. Counting — not sheep, but things around the room. Reading. Aromatherapy. Progressive muscle relaxation. Guided meditation. Some helped. Some didn’t.
Sleep studies ruled out apnea, and I refused to go back to Ambien after waking up in my apartment covered in apple sauce and McDonald’s wrappers and the sound of my car running outside.
What has helped in my journey to scoring the ever-elusive eight hours of sleep has been the sounds of ocean waves. The gentle spilling of water on an hours-long loop — courtesy of Calmsound’s “Sleep Waves” — has tremendously upgraded my sleep health. Along with a regimen of melatonin and an essential dose of cannabis indica (Granddaddy Purple and Blackberry Kush helps the sleep train pull into the station more quickly).
My Sonos is programmed with 10 hours of various water sounds — soft, rolling waves; thunderous rainstorms; steady sprinkles against a windowpane — that can pour out of my bedroom speakers at the touch of a button. Ambient noise playlists — “Deep Focus,” “Deep Sleep,” “Atmospheric Calm,” “White Noise” (all on Spotify) — also get heavy rotation in my house. And not just for sleeping. I turn to these sounds when my thoughts are colliding in my head; when blocked in my writing; or when the day has overwhelmed me. I even press play on “Sleep Waves” when my pets are feeling stressed.
— Gerrick D. Kennedy Don’t you know I need you?” sing the Everly Brothers in the ballad “Sleepness Nights,” of those racing, desperate hours.
In “Sleep Comes Down,” the Psychedelic Furs’ Richard Butler describes that same moment: “It’s raining in my head/But no tears come down/And I’m dreaming of you/Until sleep comes around.” British pop heartthrob Zayn describes nights spent “roaming and strolling all of these streets / Burning my eyes red — not slept for weeks.” “Everybody’s living or they’re dead,” sings Dustin Payseur of Beach Fossils in “Sleep Apnea.” “And I’m still in my bed / And I don’t have a clue.”
Welcome to the club. Everything is wrong when the Zs evade you. For light sleepers, those and other lyrically focused songs are strictly forbidden. The human voice is the great disrupter. So are abrupt structural shifts and dynamic tension-release songs that start quiet but get loud.
This light sleeper has found that when the snores don’t come, the solution is peaceful instrumental electronic music, much of it of the German techno variety: the minimal electronic team Burger/Ink’s album “Las Vegas”; the multi-volume Kompakt Records series called “Pop Ambient”; the peaceful concept album “Empire State Building “by Khan and Walker; and the collected work of Reinhard Voigt, who is one half of Burger/Ink and performs solo as Gas.
What connects these works is a devotion to the sonic space that exists in the blissful realm between foreground and background music.
The aim is to enter the zone similar to the one Icelandic musician Bjork roams on “Headphones.” “Genius to fall asleep to your tape last night — so warm,” she sings, capturing the sensation of disappearing within music: “Sounds go through the muscles, these abstract wordless movements.”
Her headphones saved her life, she concludes: “Your tape, it lulled me to sleep, to sleep, to sleep…”
— Randall Roberts