The Land Of Hip Na Gog
The Land Of Hip Na Gog
On music to fall asleep to
Oh sleep! it is a gentle thing,
Beloved from pole to pole!
To Mary Queen the praise be given!
She sent the gentle sleep from Heaven,
That slid into my soul.
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner
Listening to music when one falls asleep or fails to do so is its own separate avenue of musical experience, mingling as it does into dreams or delusions. The music one chooses to sleep to may be soft, but it cannot be boring, there is nothing so disruptive to the art of falling asleep as a feeling of dissatisfaction, which preludes an urgent need to get up to tinker with the playlist. But it also shouldn’t break into slamming perreo beats too often, any such call to excitement, though always better than boredom, is also understandably unsettling to an ebbing consciousness. Back when it was my mission to fully explore classical music, I landed on a few firm favourites – the Lucia Popp version of Richard Strauss’s 1938 opera Daphne, for its many magical nature passages, its oversized alpenhorn and thunderous stampede effects, its dream-like comings and goings, for the mysteries of Dionysus and Apollo it gives us to ponder (we can also ponder Strauss’s Nietzsche v Wagner incarnation of a sunny Greek Myth within misty Germanic idioms and ask how this can possibly be working as it does) and all the while there’s the anticipation of that perfect ending with Daphne’s wordless transformation, about ninety minutes in.
Or, the complete piano works of Vítězslava Kaprálová (Giorgio Koukl, or Leonie Karatas’ collection La Vita), or the volume of Koukl’s complete piano works of Martinů that contains the wild fantasy-Sonata Martinů wrote after hearing the news of Kaprálová’s death, and his later sonata that quotes from her April Preludes and a score of other piano works by Beethoven, Rachmaninov and so on. Or, the Rozhdestvensky recordings of Martinů’s 5th and 6th symphonies, with their mystical unwindings, or Barber’s second symphony with its central movement Night Flight, or Berg’s Lulu Suite, etc. You get the picture.
If in doubt (and this is New Zealand Music Month), Purple Pilgrim’s Perfumed Earth (2019) is as reliable on the cusp of sleep as it is for carrying one away in daylight, Clementine and Valentine’s incantations weaving magic around synth beats always sparking some new adventure. Synths are comforting, enchantment is the right notion, and another way to approach sleep, which is a kind of death and a kind of enchantment and also the house of nightmare, is along the darker path of witch house music, the musical equivalent of strong cheese at bedtime; SALEM’s King Night (2010) is the OG, or, a random example, ✝ DE△D VIRGIN ✝, a band I stumbled across poking into interesting folders on Soulseek with a name I’ve never worked out how to type into Spotify, let alone a song title like ✞✞✞.
If we want to ease away from the music of the uneasy, and be certain of sleeping the sleep of the just rather than that sleep of the damned that I sleep just to please you my master, Lucretia Dalt’s ¡Ay! is perfect. Dalt’s other works are ambient electronica instrumentals and I can take them or leave them, i.e. I’ve left them, but ¡Ay! folds the traditional instruments and rhythms of her Columbian home gently into the kind of dirty, exciting 2023 production I raved about a few posts back. ¡Ay! is probably the perfect sleep music for anyone given sleepless nights by my other suggestions so far.
But there’s one track of sleep music I discovered recently that rules the roost. When I was a younger wastrel I’d nod off to cassettes of The Smiths, to Morrissey’s wistful kitchen sink drone and Johnny Marr’s upbeat jangle. This was a peaceful happy place for me; Morrissey had considered non-being, he’d contemplated abstinence, he was looking for a job and then he found a job, so I didn’t need to, it was enough to take comfort in his wallowings. There are those who state, now that Morrissey has blotted his copybook by expressing unpopular opinions, some more reasonable than popular ones, some pointlessly hateful – but he’s always hated me, because I eat meat, and it’s never bothered me at all, I’m a big boy – there are those who say that Johnny Marr was the genius in The Smiths and Morrissey only dragged him down. This is the sort of thing that’s been giving virtue signaling a bad name. Johnny Marr has only ever played an interesting song next to an interesting person, whether it was Morrissey or Kirsty MacColl. Why punish yourself? Have a good listen to I Am Not a Dog on a Chain. Morrissey the pariah, Morrissey at bay, continues to entertain. People attack or defend celebrities to tell us stories about themselves which can be worth hearing, but “I am a good person because I perform the right gestures in public” is not one of them; it fails the “suspension of disbelief” test of storytelling.
A while ago I was perusing the CDs in yet another op shop. Learning from writing about Rasputina a while back that a generation of great rock music has only ever been released on CD, I dream of finding one of these lost classics in New Zealand. It hasn’t really happened yet, but I did find the Handsome Boy Modelling School CD White People (2004); HBMS are hip hop producers who work with a more arty and diverse set of talent than usual – so we get, for example, “Class System”, a tasty collaboration between Pharrell Williams and Julee Cruise.
There are spoken word interludes between tracks – DON’T DO THIS – there are maybe only two examples in history of it ageing well and one of them is Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake – Missy Elliott’s Under Construction is not the other. So, not the perfect album, but I heard this track called “The Hours” and thought “that’s a voice I need to hear more of, and that understated metal guitar riffing is really nice too” (and also “isn’t that the 12-tone serial riff I wrote for Blue Cheese?”, but I digress).
Digging into the sleevenotes, because the best part of that collab isn’t named up front, I find that both the uninhibited vocal and the grunty guitar are the work of Chino Moreno, who leads a band called Deftones, whom I never heard up till now because their name sucks. The Delfonics were good, but who names a metal band Deftones? Yet despite the name Deftones are prolific and have many, many fans and much respect in metal circles, and deservedly so; I like that Moreno has a more feminine pitch to his voice than almost all male metal singers (and also uses modulated vocal fry for effect), and that he varies his vocal expression as much as he does, I like that all the distorting production techniques I love are being applied to the service of metal, so that an exciting idiom is made even more exciting, and I like the feel of softness, of pliability and sensitivity, deep inside this hard and violent form of expression. I like that Deftones will cover karaoke songs like The Cars’ “Drive” and do it well, I like that they’ve covered The Smiths’ “Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want”, and I love that I first got to hear this because someone looped it into a one-hour YouTube video. Now you’re talking. Heard over and over again, around 20 times, this unasked-for edit lays out the genius of Morrissey and Marr’s songwriting, and the careful wonder of a Deftones arrangement, over and over so that one can note every fine point if one likes, but is more likely to be swept away on its ongoing flow. Every time it ends and starts again, one is free to question whether to let it. Every time, the answer is yes. The other night I played “please please please let me get what i want - deftones 1 hour” at a party. No-one complained. It’s perfect sleeping music, but like all perfect sleeping music, it’s very far from being only that.
algorithm nods off to The Beach Boys – “I Went To Sleep”