Rest Cycle: Miche’s Sound Sleep

This dropped a couple weeks ago, but it has finally floated into my ears at a deeply appropriate. This is a concept album about sleeping – the song titles feature specific times of the night and what’s going on as the central character sleeps. Like last year’s Sleepy Tokyo album…a concept record about lack of sleep, experienced through a Japanese workers perspective…Miche dwells on what happens late at night, here creating a soundtrack for a night of rest. This week, I have not been getting much sleep…work is especially taxing, and I have been getting an average of five hours of sleep a day. Better than a lot of folks, but it still leads to a lot of days spent wandering around the office in a drowsy state. Miche’s five-song collection is the closest I’ve come at times to a good night’s sleep.

Miche, who popped up on the PixaPhonic #2 compilation a few months ago, makes ambient music, but one that digs deeper into memories. For that comp, he provided a song evoking memories of elementary school, dotted with samples of children playing. Sound Sleep features less sampling (though on the two songs bookending the album, the sound of insects and birds do appear, observations only someone awake can pick up) and more on sounds blanketing (sorry) the listener. It gets very delicate – the gorgeous “AM 5:05 Predawn” is built around guitar and piano, with strings creeping in as the song builds, while the concluding “AM 6 Good Morning” similarly hovers around piano – but can also get a bit crushing, as on the heavy “AM 2:30 State Of Dreaming.” Yet for the most part it’s a calm recording that pulls you in, subtle shifts moving you along. Not as good as eight hours shut eye, but works in a pinch. Get it here for free.