Their second album, featuring their best-known song, Into Dust, emanates a rich indolence throughout. The output of Californian alt-rockers Mazzy Star was often described as “dream pop”. Hip-hop isn’t usually soporific music, but Texan rapper Devin Copeland’s 2002 album turns the drawled Southern style into something slow and somniferous, offering a stoned disregard for gangsta posing.ġ8. US producer Fred Gianelli is best known for pioneering industrial techno in the early 1990s, but in 2007 he produced a 10-minute, mesmerising didgeridoo odyssey. In 1982 brothers Norman and Ralston Grant, having moved from Jamaica to London, produced the first volume of their Dub Massacr’ series, deconstructing reggae into some very spaced-out territory.
This one heavily features Klimek, who aptly later created an album called Music To Fall Asleep. Since 2001 Cologne label Kompakt have annually released their soothing downtempo Pop Ambient collections. Wim Wenders asked slide-guitar virtuoso Ry Cooder to soundtrack his sun-blasted 1984 road movie, resulting in a deliciously lethargic hymn to the wide-open desert spaces of the US south. Peter Perrett’s broken-sounding acoustic strum-through of a Christmas classic, recorded on the fly for a Dutch radio show in 1979, is a narcotic two-minute adult lullaby. Touted upon its release in 2011 as the “most relaxing tune ever”, Manchester trio Marconi Union’s New Age noodling was designed in collaboration with scientists for maximum, soporific capability. It’s one of those pieces that seems as though it could ebb and flow on forever. There are reams of Beethoven recordings to choose from, but Kovacevich deals best with the slow, deep, pulsing chords that open the composer’s final piano sonata. Stephen Kovacevich: Beethoven – Piano Sonata No 32, second movement The American soft-rocker – and never was rock softer – sings a slate of soothing, inoffensive, laidback songs about banana pancakes, childhood sweethearts and watching the surf roll in and out. Over a decade later, there’s still something incomparably atmospheric about XX’s blend of yearning lyrics, endless echoes and pure, single-note riffs. It takes “lo-fi” to a new level, with Crutchfield’s elegaic and nostalgic lyrics drifting above her steady, slow guitar.īack in 2009, a debut album of sparse, pristinely-tuned electronic pop was suddenly being played everywhere. The first album by Alabaman songwriter Katie Crutchfield was recorded in one weekend in her childhood bedroom. She followed the glittering Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea (2001) and the grungy Uh Her Her (2004) with this ethereal, piano-driven masterpiece about spectres and ancient cliffs. The only musician to win two Mercury Prizes has never made the same album twice. Go and hunt them down on a streaming service of your choice. Here, we present 30 sleep-inducing pieces, songs and entire albums to fall asleep to.
But often it’s the less familiar, more esoteric pieces that encourage us to switch off.Īnd, given how hectic and stressful our lives are these days, has there ever been a greater need to listen to some calming music? Songs about sleep are a pop perennial – The Beatles alone wrote four (I’m So Tired, Golden Slumbers, Good Night and I’m Only Sleeping).
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