It was the culmination of more than a year’s work for composer Robert Rich, and now, he slept through it. Rich had listened to segments of his seven-hour opus while doing chores, checking e-mail, walking around the house, but that wasn’t the same. The music was meant to be heard as one continuous piece—a strange and dreamy soundscape that may be the longest single composition ever released.
That’s right. Seven hours.
Rich, ’85, had tried to listen to it in full once before, in his bedroom, but fear of disturbing his wife had forced him to wear headphones. And those were a bit bulky, making falling asleep a challenge. So he dragged a futon into the living room, surrounded himself with speakers and dozed off to the whisper-soft sounds, including dripping water, droning synthesizers, chimes, flutes and the electrical crackling of tropical fish.
That’s the way Rich wants his latest recording, Somnium (Hypnos, 2001), to be heard. But he didn’t design it to help people fall asleep or to give his listeners a better night’s rest. Instead, Rich wants their attention. For seven hours straight. And if the way to get into their heads for seven hours is to catch them while they are sleeping, well, that’s what he’ll do.
Described in Stereophile magazine as “a landmark in the history of recorded music,” Somnium evolved from the “sleep concerts” Rich began putting on during his time at Stanford. The all-night events drew scores of people to his dorm lounge. Rich would ask his audience to try to relax while he played quiet sounds on electronic instruments. Listeners nestled in their sleeping bags, drifting in and out of sleep. In the morning, they talked about their dreams.
Rich, a psychology major, was studying a phenomenon called lucid dreaming, in which people try to drowse attentively, watching their dreams unfold and consciously directing the story line. He was also experimenting with harmonic tuning systems at Stanford’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics. The sleep concerts brought the two pursuits together.
Since then, Rich has put on some 50 sleep concerts worldwide—plus dozens of regular concerts—and the overnight events have become legendary among fans of electronic and ambient music. Somnium is his attempt to bring a sleep concert into the home of anyone with a DVD player. (The piece is too long to be packaged on CDs.) Like the live sleep concerts, it aims to keep the mind alert while nudging the imagination, prompting listeners to hear music in a new way. Rich wants his audience to enter a trancelike state. “You might find that the sonic environment triggers dreamlike hallucinations,” he advises in the DVD’s liner notes.
The piece begins with pleasant tones, soft but gradually intensifying. A rain-like patter mixes with three slow, separate, harmonious notes, and from there Somnium whisks listeners away in a captivating dance between sleep and consciousness. By the second hour, sounds of dripping and sloshing might evoke images of a bath or shower, or maybe a creek in a dank redwood forest. The mood is murkier now. Long, deep drones join in, like the foreboding undertones heard in horror films as the hatchet-bearing killer slowly climbs the stairs.
Rich has been perfecting sounds like these for decades. Back in his Soto dorm, a heap of electronics sat humming and chirping in the corner of the room, emitting noises that would change ever so slowly. It was his attempt at exploring unconventional instruments and different types of music. “My freshman roommate was very patient with me,” he says. There would be a hum as Rich left in the morning, and it would still be going when he returned from class.
Now the hum comes from his garage studio in Mountain View, where he records much of his music. Rich sits in front of three computer monitors, with hundreds of switches and knobs on boards behind him and several large speakers at one end of the room. In his hands, he holds a plum-tree branch—a homemade chime he calls the “family tree.” Fifty-one house keys dangle from the branch. Some of the keys are 75 years old; all are from the three generations of his family that lived in the Menlo Park home where he grew up. The keys tinkle sweetly as he waves the branch.
There’s also a pedal steel guitar fitted with a magnetic coil that creates feedback, making the strings “ring.” And there’s a punctured film canister that whistles as Rich swings it around on a string. As well as the flute he made out of a sprinkler pipe. And the dead leaves he likes to crumple and crunch in his hands.
He goes beyond the studio to record “environmental textures” like the crashing of waves at Big Sur and the electrical oscillations of fish at Scripps Oceanographic Institution in San Diego. “We placed about 16 of the fish in a bucket,” he explains. “Each fish emits a unique frequency as a sort of territorial marker, and as the fish lazily circulate around the bucket, individual tones become louder or softer in a very nonhuman, slow-motion symphony.”
Sounds themselves are the starting points for his compositions: Rich records them and works from there. There is no sheet music in his studio. “Notations are meaningless,” he says. “The studio is the notation device.”
Rich has recorded more than 20 albums in 20 years. Most are meant to be heard while awake; all are meant to create moods. Classifying them by genre is tricky, though. Some seem amorphous, others rhythmic and highly patterned. Some sound dark, others light. A few early pieces were jarring and dissonant, fitting into what Rich calls “the industrial-noise punk experimental scene.” Now, his works are softer, though just as unconventional. “They don’t fit too cleanly in any category,” Rich says. “Categories are tough for me.”
More conventional, perhaps, are his two sidelines: designing sounds for movies and finalizing album production for other musicians. Soundtrack composers hire Rich to come up with original sounds to cue certain moods in movies. (This summer’s teen drama crazy/beautiful features one of them—a series of hauntingly slow, glassy string sounds evoking the poignancy of young love.) In his work as a mastering engineer, Rich tweaks and polishes finished albums to give them a more professional sound. It isn’t necessarily groundbreaking, but it helps pay the bills.
So, along with the plum branch, swinging whistle and homemade flute, his garage holds all the standard studio tools that could trick one into believing that the average pop, bubblegum, top-40 type of music is being recorded here.
Not in your wildest dreams.
Brian Eule, ’01, is a freelance writer living in Boston.
