These are some of my favorite albums to fall asleep to. They’re great when I’m wide awake as well.
This highly influential 1978 album kick-started the Ambient genre Eno had created a few years before. Its four pieces repeat simple motifs against each other, with the separate parts overlapping at different points and the resulting rhythms quite gentle. Eno constructed it in the studio using tape loops, but there’s also been a successful instrumental realization by the classical ensemble Bang on a Can. Many other Eno albums could have made this list.
Davis, especially with Harmon mute in his trumpet, was great at late-night moods. It helps that pianist Bill Evans’s near-Impressionist harmonies dominate, though most tracks are still grounded in the blues (especially the one where Davis’s then-regular pianist, Wynton Kelly, replaces Evans).
Guitarist Metheny (doubling on electric bass) moved to a spacier, more meditative sound on this 1981 release. He and keyboardist Lyle Mays are joined by versatile percussionist/vocalist Nana Vasconcelos in an album dominated by the haunting 20-minute title track. The chiming “Ozark” looks back to his earlier style, “September Fifteenth” is a hat tip to Bill Evans, and “Estupenda Graça” gives “Amazing Grace” a gorgeous Brazilian spin.
Any release by Portland, OR’s Matthew Cooper, who operates as Eluvium, would fit comfortably in this context. His ambient electronica features heavily treated loops, mostly keyboards but also guitars; its gauzy thickness gives it an amniotic feeling.
Schnittke (1934-98) commemorated 1988’s thousandth anniversary of Christianity in Russia by setting Old Russian texts—neither liturgical nor the Biblical Psalms, but rather the distinctive tradition of the penitential psalm—and capturing the spirit and sound of Orthodox chant. This is brooding a cappella choral music full of stepwise motion and much use of piquant dissonance, harsh and grinding or lush and soothing by turn. Schnittke is quoted in the booklet as saying that composing “is a matter of not disturbing my ear as it listens to what exists outside myself.” He listened well for this deeply moving masterpiece. The Swedish Radio Choir, conducted by Tõnu Kaljuste, delivers a flawless reading. Alas, this has gone out of print!
This Norwegian saxophonist’s output is very uneven, but this 1990 disc is an absolutely gorgeous mix of cool European jazz, chilled-out abstractions of African rhythms, and Scandinavian folk music.
Pianist Rainer Brüninghaus and vocalist Ingor Ántte Áilu Gaup are important ingredients of the ethereal beauty.
Not the best CT CD by a long shot, but the prettiest and least disturbing and thus a bedtime favorite. Since Liz Fraser’s lyrics (even when English) don’t “mean” anything in the normal sense, the words are no hindrance to drowsiness.
This 1984 album has three highly representative 1977 instrumental works in Pärt’s trademark Tintinnabuli style. Tabula Rasa, for two violins, prepared piano (here played by Schnittke), and chamber orchestra, is the greatest of them, a gently undulating, slowly turning spiral of sound. “Fratres” exists in at least seven different arrangements; here it’s heard in versions for violin and piano (Gidon Kremer and Keith Jarrett) and for cellos (the 12 cellists of the Berlin Philharmonic). “Cantus in memory of Benjamin Britten” is aptly somber.
Multi-instrumentalist Fang mixes electronics and gamelan music, synthesizers and traditional instruments from around the globe, on a wonderfully atmospheric album.
For his first soundtrack in 1985, Gabriel mixed new instrumentals with old music tracks from familiar songs (“Family Snapshot,” “Not One of Us,” “San Jacinto,” “Wallflower,” “Rhythm of the Heat”) but minus the vocals. Dark and, obviously, cinematic.
