The electronic musician Tom Middleton had created lulling ambient music as a member of Global Communication and and other bands in the ’90s, but had never seriously considered the connection between sleep and music until he developed insomnia after years of touring the globe and partying all night. ![]() While Rich, Basinski and others pushed the bounds of convention, others entered the sleep music space for more practical reasons. “But it allowed me to fall in and out of time-to get some peace, daydream.” “I would have loved if people got more what I was doing-but it took quite a while,” he says. Initially, there was little interest in his work beyond his Brooklyn bubble. At the time, Basinski was toying with generative music and feedback loops-music that unfolded slowly over hours. William Basinski likewise approached sleep music through the lens of minimalist experimentation. “The intention was not to make music to sleep more deeply, but to enhance the edges of sleep and explore one’s consciousness.” “I was fascinated by the idea of using music for trance-inducing purposes,” he tells TIME. His audience settled into their sleeping bags in a dorm lounge while Rich created drones with a tape echo, a digital delay and a spring reverb for 9 hours. ![]() One of the acolytes of this scene was Robert Rich, who, as a Stanford student in 1982, staged his first “sleep concert” to about 15 dozers. ![]() Riley was inspired by Eastern mysticism and all-night Indian classical music events, and aimed to provoke rather than soothe: “It felt like a great alternative to the ordinary concert scene,” he said in a 1995 interview. More recently, a Western fascination with sleep music reemerged in the ’60s, when experimental minimalist composers like John Cage, Terry Riley and members of the Fluxus collective began staging all-night concerts. Sleep and music have been intertwined for centuries: a creation myth of Bach’s Goldberg Variations involves a sleepless Count.
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