Sleep Music Vol. 3

Samples of 20th century orchestral works paint a dark landscape beneath a pulsating omnichord sky.


My motivation for these pieces is described in the notes of volume 1. I like to sleep to music but so little music likes me to sleep to it. Here’s hoping you never hear the end of any of these pieces.

Although it is somewhat akin to musical white noise, this music in not designed to be boring–it is designed to be rich listening experience, engaging in just the right way so as to disengage the mind from the tangles of consciousness and set it down softly into sleep.

Volume 3 was recorded during darkest days of December 2017. Recording and mixing only at night by candle-light, these sounds are not meant to be listened to in any other circumstance other than in bed on your way to sleep. They make little to no sense in the daytime. The music is specifically designed to accompany and facilitate your journey to the dreamworld. No sudden dynamic shifts, no silence, a wide range of frequencies to both drown out and merge with environmental sounds. Breaking-down instead of building-up, these pieces follow a long slow arc of diminuendo until they almost imperceptibly dissolve.

Eric Schopmeyer: omnichord, casio, vibraphone, marimba, guitar, piano.

Low strings are provided by extensive sampling from 20th century orchestral music of Bartok, Shostakovich, Gorecki and Sibelius.

Like Bartok’s own forays into polytonality, this piece exploits various tensions between dueling tonalities, or between the feeling stasis and motion, pulling at each other just as the conscious and unconscious mind states blur and separate as we shift from waking life to dreaming.

Cover image by Jan Mankes (1889-1920)

Released January 1, 2018