Up to 35 percent of adults in the US have symptoms of insomnia (according to a 2025 study ). But those people’s night-time struggles vary significantly. They may have difficulty falling asleep, staying asleep or returning to sleep. Patients can suffer short-term or chronic afflictions. And the condition can be linked to anxiety, depression, chronic pain or other conditions.
This twelve-track album by improvising saxophonist Andy Haas expresses the peculiarities of those various bedtime hardships—from overactive synapses and hyperactive fingertips to loneliness, self-pity and despair. It was recorded on the Winter Solstice of 2025 and presents Haas alone with his saxophones, as well as a Nano Pulsar pedal that chops, splits and reshapes his instrument’s sound.
Nifty pedalwork opens up an expansive spectrum of manipulated outputs. Several tracks feature duplicate voices that suggest Haas talking to himself in the twilight. “Heart Less” involves two long-note drones that start at opposite ends of the saxophone’s register and meet in the middle. “This Dark Land” uses a similar technique, with voices helixing around a central pattern of changing pitch.
Bursts of sound and oscillating frequencies are also common textural tricks. On “An Attenuated Goodbye”, a bluesy initial passage flits from singing to silence and back again. “The Cold Inside Us” has a piercing, car-alarm quality. Both pieces remind the listener of nights where a painful incident from the past refuses to subside or a concern about the future declines to wait until morning.
Amid the midnight misery, there is a playful property to this thirty-minute experiment. In general, Haas tends to favor the higher register of his instrument. This adds a squeaky cheekiness to tracks like “Sense Less” and “Sleep Less”. His playing has a more noodly nature here, like a person exploring the liberating options that become available when the rest of humanity is in the sack.
In Praise of Insomnia balances tonal and textural variety with recurring motifs, methodologies and moods. Although Andy Haas is a detail-driven artist, his improvisations often express a light-humored and capricious temper. This album is unlikely to help anybody fall asleep, stay asleep or return to sleep. But it might coax their mind down intriguing paths while they navigate restless hours in the day or the night.
The album is available on CD and as a digital download here .
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