The liquid mind story

The Story of Chuck Wild

Paid and presented by Myndstream.

Chuck Wild is relaxed and philosophical when he talks about his career. A music veteran, Wild has worked with some of the industry’s biggest names, and now is the mind behind the growing market for meditation, sleep, and deep relaxation music, also known as "sedative music". You would be forgiven for thinking his calmness is based on the success he has enjoyed.

Wild’s journey to this point has been long and arduous – at times his career has tested his mental health to its limits. He says that at his lowest point his anxiety “almost killed him”. The fact he couldn’t see it coming, he adds, shows that a crisis can creep up on you. 

But he says that music helped to save his life, and now his passion is to give his music away for free to anyone else who needs it. Wild believes that music can help to protect and restore our mental health. This is his story.

Max Headroom (summer 1987)

He and Hoenig were given seven to 10 days to compose music for each 43-minute episode. They would then take their mixes to the editing suite in Hollywood where the timing would be fine-tuned based on the final cut of an episode.

“It was a lot of fun in the beginning,” says Wild, but the work started to mount up. Each rough edit arriving at Hoenig’s studio was delayed because of problems with the filming schedule. Soon the pair had less than four days to complete each soundtrack. “There was no way to sketch, write, arrange, compose and mix 43 minutes of music and also sleep,” he says, so Wild stayed at the studio. He says they were getting by on four hours sleep each night in order to finish.

“The courier from the network was literally standing outside the door waiting for us to hand him something, and then we'd have to hop in the car drive up to Hollywood, where they were laying in the music,” he says.

Crisis (autumn 1987)

While work continued on Max Headroom, Wild was hearing news of many friends who were both sick and dying of Aids. The Aids crisis was then considered “the most urgent health problem facing the world”, and yet, few approved treatments were available. News that a friend had tested positive often proved terminal.

But with the pressure of his work and in his sleep-deprived state, Wild struggled to express his emotions. “It made me sad, but I couldn't cry,” he says, adding that he kept a record of the friends he lost by marking their names in a “kind of roll of honour”.

For three months Wild worked 20-hour days, all the time hearing that friends had tested positive for Aids. “I started having trouble taking a deep breath,” says Wild. “That was the first symptom. And I started feeling this tension in my stomach, like my stomach muscles would never relax, then I would start to get a little bit dizzy. I didn't know what it was, but I learned later this is called hyperventilation.”

Therapy (1988)

After his panic attack on the runway, Wild knew he needed more guidance. He only took the drugs for one day, and followed the meditation instructions daily, which helped, but he was still feeling anxious. He used acupuncture several times a week, saw a therapist, and a counsellor who asked if he could compose music that reflected the way he wished to feel. His first attempts were too upbeat, and after struggling to write music he could meditate to, he found inspiration in his childhood.

From the age of four, Wild would sit behind the organist at church, following her as she played. On one occasion, the organist was unavailable, but with some training, Wild was encouraged to step in. She told him to hold chords during prayers and change them every few seconds.

“It just came to me as I was holding a chord – I know how to write meditation music,” says Wild. “I started working on the first piece, called Zero Degrees Zero.”

We now have a better understanding of the link between music, meditation and health – it can lower overall anxiety levels, and might even lower stress levels of patients recovering from surgery. Meditative music appears to work best at slow tempos around 60-80 beats per minute, which is roughly the same as the resting heart rate. Wild, however, describes his music as zero-beat sedative music. It also helps if the music has no lyrics, he says.

At the time, however, Wild just had a feeling that his music could help people.