Chuck Wild Liquid Mind VIII: Sleep

Do you ever get it, when you’re up, fiddling with the computer, watching TV, and you’re mind-numbingly exhausted? You’re thinking, ‘damn, if I could drag myself from this couch, and plop my arse in the bed, I’d be out cold.’

So, finally, you rip yourself from that ever-important 2,000,000th Seinfeld re-run and get ready for bed. Problem is, you still need to brush your teeth, slip off your jeans, kick on the A.C. and then, then, you lay down. Of course, by this point, your brain’s processed more in ten minutes than it did in an hour processing sitcoms. And so, you wait.

While I don’t personally listen to music as I’m trying to go to sleep – I find myself thinking too much about the music and less about the slumber – composer Chuck Wild’s Liquid Mind VIII: Sleep could prove an excellent part of your pre-sleep regimen.

Dubbed as “ultra-slow,” and by some “space music,” Sleep presents to the listener a wider perspective of the universe. It’s large without necessarily needing to be doing a million things at once. “Night Light” eases into “Moment of Grace” into “Journey to Peace” and so on. Of course, if it was intended for a soundtrack to sleeping, they should ease rather than shock, yes? Liquid Mind VIII: Sleep does just that. Similar to Shajan’s 2004 release, The Healing Touch, compositions are languid and ambient – not quite comparable to Wild’s former Missing Persons band mate Patrick O’Hearn (whose recent works have been slow but not necessarily “spacey”), but certainly not to the keys of the Rick Wakeman kind, where the legendary virtuoso seems like he’s playing 10 keyboards at the same time.

And, look! William C. Dement, M.D., Ph.D, director of the Sleep Disorders and Research Center of Stanford University School of Medicine gives it his thumbs up! And so do I. While I prefer the droning hum of an air conditioner to the sound of music, I have, and continue to listen to Liquid Mind VIII: Sleep as a pre-cursor to getting some shuteye. It certainly beats leaving the idiot box on all night.