Sleep (Max Richter album)

Background

According to Richter, as described in the album's credits, Sleep is "an eight-hour lullaby", "a piece that is meant to be listened to at night ... structured as a large set of variations."

Richter conferred with American neuroscientist David Eagleman while working on the album's piece to learn about how the brain functions during sleep. Richter stated, "Sleeping is one of the most important things we all do ... We spend a third of our lives asleep and it's always been one of my favourite things, ever since I was a child. ... For me, Sleep is an attempt to see how that space when your conscious mind is on holiday can be a place for music to live."

From Sleep

The release of Sleep was accompanied by the one-hour-long album, entitled From Sleep (stylized as from Sleep), with seven additional tracks, not present on the eight-hour release, recorded during the same sessions.

From Sleep was promoted by music videos for three tracks: "Dream 13 (Minus Even)," "Path 5 (Delta)" and "Dream 3 (In the Midst of My Life)." Additionally, remixed versions of the three tracks, by Mogwai, Clark, Digitonal, Jürgen Müller, Kaitlyn Aurelia and Marconi Union, have been featured on a subsequent remix album Sleep Remixes, released digitally on February 19, 2016.

Live performance

The album was performed in its entirety as one compositional piece at the Reading Room at Wellcome Collection in London, England on September 27, 2015 from midnight to 8:00 AM as the climax of the BBC Radio 3 "Science and Music" weekend.

The performance broke several records, including the longest live broadcast of a single piece of music in BBC Radio 3's station's history. The performance also set Guinness World Records for longest broadcast of a single piece of music and longest live broadcast of a single piece of music.

Instead of chairs to sit in and watch the performance, audience members were given beds to sleep in.

Richter played piano, keyboards, and electronics, and was joined by Grace Davidson (soprano), Reiad Chibah (viola), Natalia Bonner and Steve Morris (violins), and Ian Burdge and Chris Worsey (cellos).

Critical reception

Sleep received wide acclaim from contemporary music critics. At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the album received an average score of 79, based on 7 reviews, which indicates "generally favorable reviews".

Jon Falcone gave the album a very positive review, stating, "Sleep implores you for companionship and bleeds into itself as it bleeds into the listener. Typing while the fizz of ‘Never Fade Into Nothingness’ plays makes transforms Word documents in an epic dance of black pixels on white light, binary marks scratching into a too-bright glassy reflection. Walking while the echo-drenched monastic vocals of ‘Non-Eternal’ exposes that the world we occupy is haunted is exhilarating and avoiding awkward work colleagues as ‘If You Came This Way’ patters out its motif, that dangles held violin notes over electronic burbles, is to experience the sound of solace itself."

Grayson Haver Currin of Pitchfork Media gave the album a positive review, stating, "At its best, Sleep feels like compositionally rigorous new age music. It’s a place in which you can settle for a while, with or without a pillow, and emerge only when you are ready to rejoin the restive world." However, Currin was also slightly critical of the release, stating, "Sleep, then, is simply too didactic as a name. It’s a command that tells us how to enjoy something that clearly has other uses. That handle, combined with Richter’s conceit, has turned the record into a kind of clickbait story, too, which seems entirely antithetical to Richter’s point."

Track listing

All tracks written by Max Richter.

Personnel

Charts