I’ve had insomnia troubles for years. It can take me hours to fall asleep and I can wake several times during the evening. I’ve tried all kinds of shit, earplugs, caffeine abstinence, exercise, etc. Lately, it’s been the worst ever, enough for doctor to prescribe me Ambien. I’ve been taking it for about two months and the stuff is great shit. I pop a pill and in about twenty minutes I drop like a sack of meat and stay that way till morning; waking with no residual grogginess. I love Ambien, but I’m reluctant to take it often. Reliance on prescription drugs to sleep is probably not the best course to pursue.

Anyway, what I usually do is take Ambien during nights where I have to work the next day, that way I don’t show up at the office completely cracked out from only two or three hours of fitful sleep. Over the weekend, I try not to take Ambien, trying just to relax or at the very least, test how bad the insomnia is currently.

One thing I’ve been looking into is hypnosis and the use of binaural sound to induce relaxation and/or sleep. I purchased my first binaural recording about fifteen years ago and I’ve been collecting them here and there since then. I find that some headphones and some binaural sound on loop can really put me down into a light trance state at times making it much easier to sleep or at the very least, relax.
(more…)

Lately, I’ve been really getting more and more into Doom Metal, especially Drone Doom and Funeral Doom. I’ve also been going apeshit on Dark Ambient, Experimental and Ambient Noise albums. It’s all great shit to zone to. Here’s some of the albums I’ve snagged off of eMusic this past month that I’m really digging:

(more…)

Since I’m still loving eMusic and have been racking new albums every month, I thought I’d list some of the better to best shit I’ve accrued lately.

Electric Wizard is by far one the dopest, heaviest bands around. Their Ozzy-era Black Sabbath-inspired, Stoner/Sludge Doom Metal style is straight-up 70’s era evil psychedelia. It’s loud, chunking and very slow. I have all of their albums and my latest addition, “Come My Fanatics“, is by far their best work and definitely one of the best albums I’ve ever owned in my life. It’s low, slow, evil-hippy vibe makes me want to start wearing denim jackets, grow a fu-manchu, contact Satan and start living out a van (complete with air-brushing). I highly recommend this album.

Boris is a Japanese experimental band who are difficult to place in a genre. Though I only have one of their albums, I’ve read they bounce all over the place with different styles of noise/music. “Absolutego” is one 65-minute long track of ambient noise/Drone Doom filled will slowly plodding bass, buzzing guitars, lotsa feedback and heavy usage of the e-bow. There’s no riffs, melodies or anything. Just ambient guitar noise for over an hour and it’s great. Truly creepy, bad acid trip shit. This is a soundtrack to accompany corpses crawling out of graves. I’m definitely going to check out their other albums.

Similar in style and direction is the band Sunn 0)) (pronounced “Sun” and named after the amplifiers they use). Extremely slow and heavy, using droning, heavily-distorted guitars and sound effects to create a dark, malevolent soundscape, Sunn 0)) are prime examples of Drone Doom. The album “Flight of the Behemoth” is five really long tracks of ambient doom, despair and inscrutable evil. I love these guys. To top it all off, the duo that makes up this band wear evil monk robes whenever they perform live! Could it be cooler?

In fact, I love them so much, I bought another one of their albums, called “The Grimm Robe Demos“. It’s exactly the same kind of shit, which is perfect. Evil, weird, down-tuned and long. Lacking any discernible form or structure, it is music for alien landscapes. That said it’s not for everyone. If you’re not into evil, ambient noise then this music is either going to scare you or give you a headache (or quite possibly both), but if you dig the heavy, creepy shit, you’ll love Sunn 0))) and these two albums.

I’m really into Metal. Death Metal, Black Metal, Sludge, Doom, Blackened Death Metal, Viking Metal… on and on. It’s the best shit in the world. But, I will admit I’ve become addicted to the polar opposite. As of late, I’m all about hippy, nature sound recordings.

You know, those CDs that sit in the bargain bin of your local record store’s New Age section. The albums where some geriatric and well-bearded hippy trudges a recording setup out into the middle of some remote and uninhabited area and records whatever natural, ambient noise is going on, slaps it onto a CD and sells it out of the back of his VW bus to keep himself in yogurt and granola.

I’ve always been a fan of ambient noise and these nature sound disks deliver well, but due to their being just a recording of background noise, I can crank it up without being distracted.

Here’s a link to a collection I’ve been downloading off of eMusic. Out of the bunch, the forest one is my favorite so far.