Akku Quintet — Stages of Sleep

We spend about one third of our life sleeping. However, we know relatively little about this vital necessity.When sleeping the body proceeds into a state of external rest. Pulse and respiratory
rate drop, and cerebral activity changes. While falling asleep and waking up dreams and actualities merge into a strange reality. We drift into a sea of dreams and imaginary worlds. Mostly we only remember dream scraps or mood images which suddenly reappear in the middle of everyday life. What we really  "experience" in the parallel world of sleep and what happens within our brains remains a mystery. Why do we sleep and what happens to us while we apparently do nothing?
Everyone who knows the "snooze" button knows what it feels like to be drifting back and forth between sleep and wakefulness. The morning confrontation with this phenomenon fascinated the Bernese drummer and composer Manuel Pasquinelli and led to his idea to set music to a sleep cycle.
Inspired by the dreamy and scientific aspects of sleep, these compositions have grown to a "dream suite" over the past 2-3 years. This musical sleep cycle can now be listened to on the debut album "Stages Of Sleep" by Pasquinelli's band AKKU quintet . Every piece corresponds to one of the five stages of sleep, which we live through several times a night. The pieces - as well as the different stages of sleep - merge fluently into one another. Spherical sound sceneries and familiar melodies are broken up by rhythmical patterns and dynamic soli. Starting with the quiet tones of falling asleep, passing the leeways of deep sleep up to the rousing dreams during the REM stage, sleep is illuminated in all its facets.