Wild’s conversion to the art of the soporific did not come by choice. It was, instead, the product of an acute personal crisis. Liquid Mind was his salvation. “I almost killed myself,” Wild says matter-of-factly. He was not suicidal. He just almost worked himself to death.

For a time Wild lived the rock’n’roll dream. He was the keyboardist for Missing Persons, a rock band heavy on mascara, big hair and tight trousers; the lead singer, Dale Bozzio, was famed for her coconut-shell bras. They were regulars at the fabled LA music club Whisky a Go Go and played to crowds of tens of thousands. “We warmed up for David Bowie at the Us festival,” Wild says. “It was incredible.”

Wild rubbed shoulders with legends including the Allman Brothers and Quincy Jones, scored an Emmy-winning television show, wrote music for the Pointer Sisters and, of course, collaborated with the biggest pop star in history. For a boy from Missouri who showed up in LA “with $300 in my pocket”, it was the stuff of fairytales. But like any tale of Hollywood fame, it could not last. “All my music was fast. Everything I did was fast,” he recalls. “I couldn’t do anything that was slow.”

In 1988 Wild was hired to score the final season of Max Headroom, a quintessentially 1980s television show created by Channel 4 and sold into America. For a brief moment the programme, centred on the “computer-generated” character Max, captured the zeitgeist and Wild was working 20-hour days. He guzzled industrial-strength coffee and for months captured only fleeting moments of sleep. One day he found himself struggling to breathe. “I thought I was having a heart attack,” he recalls.

A friend threw him in his Porsche and sped to the nearest doctor. It was not a heart attack, the doctor told him, but a panic attack. “I’ll never forget this in my whole life,” Wild recalls. “In one hand, the doctor held up meditation instructions. In the other, it was a medication prescription. He said, ‘The two of these — it’s only one letter different. And they’re both as effective for treating anxiety. Your choice.’ ”

Wild took both, but neither helped immediately. Something in him had broken.

As a gay man in the 1980s, Wild had watched friend after friend die from Aids. “I stopped counting at 65,” he says, welling up. “We would go there and sit at these funerals, the group of gays. At some, the parents would look at us and tell us we needed to leave. None of us cried. I didn’t cry for four years.”

That first panic attack was like a dam breaking. He would have several a day, rendering him a barely functional hermit. “I was insane,” he says. “When you are having a panic attack, you’re not very rational. Everything was jerky movements. It was, like, ‘I gotta eat really quick, I got to do this really quick.’ ”

As he slowly emerged from the fog, via meditation and therapy, his psychologist gave him an ultimatum: no more therapy until he took a single day for himself.

So Wild booked one night in a motel on the coast, ventured out to a rock and watched the waves break. He was 42 years old and had been in Los Angeles for nearly a decade, but had never gone to the beach until that moment. “All of a sudden I was feeling very relaxed and I thought, ‘What’s going on?’ I was sitting there and I said to myself, ‘I wonder if it’s the sound of the ocean? Maybe the sound of the liquid is relaxing my mind.’ ” he says. “Liquid Mind was born out of pain. It was born out of sleep deprivation. It was lemonade from lemons.” That was in 1988.

Walk into Wild’s one-storey, two-bedroom home and “cocoon” comes to mind. It is the middle of the day but all the blinds are closed. Soundproofing covers the doors. The windows are quadruple-paned — so as not to bother the neighbours. It is quiet and clean. The fridge is sparsely stocked: an unmistakable sign of Wild’s bachelorhood. This is not entirely by choice, he says. “At a certain point, I just decided to stop trying. All my boyfriends died.”

His living room is functionally the “studio”. It includes a grand piano piled high with papers and computers, two banks of keyboards, a central sound-engineering console and at least four sets of speakers, each with distinct characteristics. Wild still works a gruelling schedule — up to 12 hours a day. A single album can take a year to produce, not least because he and his co-producer Jonathan, a university student, can only work on the actual music for a few hours at a time before one of them conks out.

Wild plays all the instruments and then painstakingly mixes them together so the chords blend seamlessly. “In music therapy you want to avoid what they call an ‘arousal response’. You don’t want to do anything that attracts attention,” he says. Why all the speakers? “Every speaker gives you a different message. Most engineers learn one set of speakers and they do brilliant work. I do this because I know that people listen to my music on ghetto blasters, on headsets, on telephones. I want it to sound equally good everywhere.”

There are plenty of studies that have shown music to be beneficial: for babies, for insomniacs, for students, for older adults. Indeed the practice of music therapy, for sleep and other therapeutic purposes, has been around for decades. If you count Tibetan monks, who famously use chanting to slow their heartbeats, it has been around for centuries. But now that sleep is “a thing”, both among public health officials and in popular culture, there is renewed urgency to find solutions. Sleep has been transformed into a metric to be tracked — by your phone, your smartwatch or fitness tracker.

At Myndstream, Moross has partnered with SleepScore Labs, a maker of sleep analysis devices, to carry out a longitudinal study of people with sleep disorders. Their patterns will be monitored for three weeks without intervention and then they will be exposed to Wild’s music. The study will also test alternative sleep music to see whether Wild’s outperforms.

This is critical. The dawn of so-called “generative” artificial intelligence has led to an explosion in computer-generated tracks. Scroll through Spotify or Apple Music and they are chock-full of sleep songs pumped out by nameless computer programs. Tracks often clock in at just longer than 30 seconds — the minimum length to trigger a payout by the platforms. “The question when we bought this catalogue,” Moross says, “was whether AI would overtake ambient music. We took a pretty heavy bet that actually, you will never replace human creation.”

Wild’s music education started aged four, when he was diagnosed with Perthes disease, a hip condition that, in 1953, was treated by a year of bed rest followed by another year in a leg brace. Wild’s parents hired a caretaker who also happened to be a pianist. Every day she would carry him to the piano and teach him how to play.

He eventually got back on his feet, but stuck with the lessons through his teenage years. At church, he convinced the organist to let him sit with her during services and eventually to play. By the time he went to university, the Vietnam draft was plucking healthy young men from the population in their thousands and sending them off to fight in the jungle. Wild’s father, a former US army colonel, told him to join the ROTC, a university programme that offered part-time training and allowed cadets to enter military service at a higher rank. Wild spent four years in the navy, where he served as an admiral’s aide. It was in the military that he first felt an acute sense of danger due to his sexuality. “I knew I was gay at the time, and being gay in the navy is a big no-no,” he says. “I had seen all these people get court-martialled and dishonourably discharged for being gay.”

When he returned to Kansas City, he fulfilled a promise to work at his father’s insurance company but also started playing in cover bands at night. After a couple of years he went on the road and then into the music business full time. And then, eventually, to total burnout.

It was Michael Jackson who helped launch his new life. After his beachfront revelation, Wild had started to work on his “slow music” and, at first, it was a labour of love. “By 1992 I was giving away hundreds of cassettes,” he says. “I just thought, ‘This music is helping me.’ I used to listen to it 24 hours a day at home.” No one, however, was paying for Liquid Mind music back then.

He taught music to get by, but didn’t make anywhere near enough to start his own label. An industry friend told him he’d need $150,000 to get “Chuck Wild Records” off the ground.

Then, in 1994, Wild got a call from a producer friend who said he was working with “the Glove”, as Jackson was known. “He called up and said, ‘Michael wants you to make some of those great sounds like you did on Max Headroom.’ ” So he got to work. Wild hired a team of three people and sent them out across southern California, tape recorders in hand, to record hours and hours of ambient sounds.

Wild would then engineer the results into unique clips, drive to whichever studio Jackson might be recording at and play him his manufactured audio. It was painstaking work, for which he was paid handsomely. A few of his sounds made it into Jackson’s 1995 album HIStory, but he couldn’t be sure how many. “I never listened to the album,” he says. “I have this thing about not listening to my own music — except in the early days, when I felt it was saving my life.”

Over four years Jackson paid Wild roughly $150,000 — the Liquid Mind nest egg. Wild recalls: “I said, ‘Michael, you know it’s your money that financed Liquid Mind?’ And he put his hand up to his chest and said, ‘That makes me feel good.’ ”

Today, at 76, Wild remains a man in a hurry. He estimates he still works 12 hours a day, but it is different now. “Although my routine is a lot of hours, I’m also doing work I love. It’s not stressful to me,” he says. “The [album] titles represent my life journey.” These titles reflect the soothing nature of the content, helping listeners to tap into a world of soporific calm. The initial Liquid Mind release, Ambience Minimus in 1994, was followed by albums including Dream, Deep Sleep and Relaxing Rain & Ocean Mixes.

After spending the best part of the day with Wild, he insists on driving me back to the airport. He doesn’t put on any music, and certainly not his — but not because of his aversion to listening to his own work. “Please make sure this is part of whatever you print,” he says. “You never, ever listen to Liquid Mind when you’re driving. It makes people sleepy. It’s music as medicine, you know. It needs to be FDA-regulated. I wish they would.”

They just might.

Full article available here via the Sunday Times.

Swizz Beatz says, “Jazz has always been magic to our ears. I feel like it should definitely get more attention. This is the first step to pay homage to the great craft & art. Photography is also one of the best expressions of art and should be shown more often. Art & music are brothers and sisters so I thought it was a great match. I’m a big fan of Kwame and I also love that I’m able to share pieces from my collection through music.”

The partnership with 12on12 builds from their prior collaboration in creating limited album releases for Travis Scott in partnership with Saint Laurent and with RUN DMC. Founder and Chief Creative of 12on12 Claudia Moross adds, “Our goal is to create transcending experiences through music and art, the combination of playing the record while exploring the thoughtfully curated artwork commissioned for the sleeve allows for a precious moment of cultural enjoyment. 12on12’s are very much pieces of art that can be collected and treasured. With Swizz’s finger on the pulse and his well-documented history within music and art, the brand will be upping the ante as we look to work with the very best artists, both visual and musical, to curate future Vinylworks. I am really looking forward to the next chapter for 12on12 and with the expertise and passion Swizz Beatz brings to the table I’m really excited for what’s to come for the brand.”

Swizz Beatz is not only the latest curator to work with 12on12 but he also comes on board as their new business partner. Acquiring a strategic stake in the high-end luxury vinyl brand, Swizz continues to build on 12on12’s reputation for unique ‘Vinylworks’ and bespoke limited collector’s editions by compiling his own exclusive 12” vinyl compilation.

For Long Live Jazz, Swizz has selected a truly interesting playlist:

Side A

Until the Real Thing Comes Along by JD Allen

Doubts 2 by Ibrahim Maalouf

Osmosis Part III by Paul Motian, Bill Frisell, Joe Lovano

Side B

Call Out My Name by New Masters feat. Immanuel Williams

Never Let Me Go by Houston Person

I’ve Grown Accustomed To Her Face – Live by Wes Montgomery

Side C

In A Sentimental Mood by Sonny Rollins feat. The Modern Jazz Quartet

Little Girl Blue by Jeremy Pelt

Doubts by Ibrahim Maalouf

Side D

Alone Together – Rudy Van Gelder Remaster by Kenny Dorham

‘Round Midnight (Mono Version) by Miles Davis

In The Wee Small Hours Of The Morning by Bill Frisell, Thomas Morgan

Whether it be in music, fine art, sports, business, or culture, Swizz Beatz consistently challenges and changes the status quo. The Bronx native started disrupting back in 1998. Straight out of the gate, he produced one of the most popular hip-hop songs in history: DMX’s double-platinum “Ruff Ryders’ Anthem.” He has sales of over 350 million albums worldwide with a bulletproof discography highlighted by classics such as JAY-Z’s “Jigga My N****” and the GRAMMY® Award-winning “On To The Next One,” Beyoncé’s “Ring the Alarm,” Lil Wayne’s “Uproar,” and dozens of others. Billboard touted him in the Top 20 of “The 50 Greatest Producers of the 21st Century,” and Kanye West christened him, “The best rap producer of all time.” In addition, Swizz graduated from Harvard Business School’s OPM Program and made history as New York University’s first “Producer in Residence.”

PRE-ORDER HERE

Full article available here.

They are the ultimate music power couple. Keys, 41, needs no introduction; her husband, Beatz, 43, born Kasseem Dean, is less well known but equally successful. Named one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people of 2021, he is the producer behind some of the biggest musicians of our day, including Jay-Z, Beyonce, and Kanye West. Fuelling sales of more than 350 million albums worldwide, he has been hailed by West as “the best rap producer of all time”.

Full article available here.

For his debut curated set, Swizz Beatz is releasing Long Live Jazz – an exclusive 12” vinyl only compilation featuring photography from his own private collection (The Dean Collection), as the unique work of art for the record. The piece of art selected for the cover image ‘Untitled (Grandassas in Car)’ was shot in 1968 during a Garvey Day Celebration in New York by Kwame Brathwaite

Swizz Beatz’s 12On12 debut is a limited edition deluxe premium double gatefold package that is hand-numbered to a run of 1000 copies featuring “a meticulously selected track list celebrating Swizz’s love and passion for jazz across its four sides.”

Included on Swizz’s tracklist are Miles Davies’ Round Midnight and Kenny Dorham’s Alone Together, as well as a reworking of The Weeknd’s hit single Call Out My Name by a group of today’s leading jazz musicians – the New Masters featuring Immanuel Wilkins.

Speaking about his 12On12 partnership with Music Week, Swizz Beatz said: “The company is extraordinary. I always wanted to be an owner in a wax company – 12On12 was the perfect opportunity because not only do they deal with vinyl, we’re dealing with art and lifestyle, too. This is the perfect time for people to see something like this come together, and for my first offering to be jazz.”

12on12 have also partnered with Vinyl Me, Please (VMP) for the release of ‘Long Live Jazz to ensure they reach a large, dedicated base of fans.

12on12’s founder & chief creative Claudia Moross said: “Our goal is to create transcending experiences through music and art, the combination of playing the record while exploring the thoughtfully curated artwork commissioned for the sleeve allows for a precious moment of cultural enjoyment. 12On12’s are very much pieces of art that can be collected and treasured. With Swizz’s finger on the pulse and his well-documented history within music and art, the brand will be upping the ante as we look to work with the very best artists, both visual and musical, to curate future Vinylworks. I am really looking forward to the next chapter for 12On12 and with the expertise and passion Swizz Beatz brings to the table I’m really excited for what’s to come for the brand.”

Swizz added: “Jazz has always been magic to our ears. I feel like it should definitely get more attention! This is the first step to pay homage to the great craft & art. Photography is also one of the best expressions of art and should be shown more often. Art & Music are brothers and sisters so I thought it was a great match. I’m a big fan of Kwame and I also love I’m able to share pieces from my collection through music!”

Swizz Beatz’ Long Live Jazz limited edition vinyl is available for pre-order now, with orders shipping from February 25.

You can see the full tracklisting of Long Live Jazz below:

TRACKLISTING

Side A

• Until the Real Thing Comes Along by JD Allen
• Doubts 2 by Ibrahim Maalouf
• Osmosis Part III by Paul Motian, Bill Frisell, Joe Lovano

Side B

• Call Out My Name by New Masters feat. Immanuel Williams
• Never Let Me Go by Houston Person
• I’ve Grown Accustomed To Her Face – Live by Wes Montgomery

Side C

• In A Sentimental Mood by Sonny Rollins feat. The Modern Jazz Quartet
• Little Girl Blue by Jeremy Pelt
• Doubts by Ibrahim Maalouf

Side D

• Alone Together – Rudy Van Gelder Remaster by Kenny Dorham
• ‘Round Midnight (Mono Version) by Miles Davis
• In The Wee Small Hours Of The Morning by Bill Frisell, Thomas Morgan

Full article available here.

Speaking to 12on12 founder Claudia Moross, she told City A.M.: “I was inspired to start 12on12 in 2015 when I began to notice the huge resurgence in vinyl as collectibles. What the medium of vinyl provides that CD, cassette or digital can’t, is not only a higher quality sound but a much larger space for self-expression in the artwork and packaging.”

Another key feature of vinyl is that, unlike a digital playlist, it is not easy to skip or shuffle songs.

“It’s beauty is in putting a record on and sitting and listening right through while perusing the artwork and sleeve – it would be incongruous to have a slash metal track followed by a folk song. The compilation has to be curated by the cultural icons in a way that provides a certain experience for the listener – this is all a part of the creativity of the projects”, she added.

Moross said that the resurgence of vinyl is rooted in the fact that consumers are now craving “physicality and superior sound quality of music that was lost due to the digital era”.

In particular, she finds the huge growth in the under 35 year-old age group particularly interesting.

“I believe a big part of this is due to the fact they grew up in the time of mp3s and digital downloads and didn’t have the experience of buying their first CD, putting it on, listening to it from top to bottom while reading the liner notes and lyrics”, she told City A.M.

In terms of future ambitions, she said the plan is to create experiential activations that tap into nostalgia, and to create luxury merchandise, collaborating with creatives and licensing the 12on12 brand.

She said this would only happen when “the time is right”, and explained that the new partnership with Grammy-award winning producer Swizz Beatz, which was announced today, would help facilitate this.

Swizz is not only acquiring a strategic stake in 12on12, but he will also build on its reputation for unique ‘vinylworks’ and bespoke collectors’ editions following previous collaborations.

He will be compiling his own exclusive limited edition 12” vinyl only compilation featuring a selected tracklist celebrating Swizz’s love and passion for jazz across its four sides.

“One of our ultimate goals is to be to vinyl what Supreme is to skateboarding, we want to build a trusted pop culture brand in the music and visual art worlds and will expand from there”, Moross said.

Full article available here.