In 2012 Max Richter began to imagine music that was a dam against hectic life, compulsive hyperconnection, anxiety without a connatured object to our lifestyle. Richter explains: “I was thinking about how great works of art can provide an alternative landscape in which to live in. I said to myself: perhaps I could write a piece that works as a resting place, capable of stopping for a moment the traffic of information on the information highway”. Three years of work brought him, in 2015, to Sleep: eight and a half hours of music published in an eight CD box with the famous lunar cover conceived by the creative partner Yulia Mahr. A work born “to offer a new daily beginning, a tabula rasa”, which draws “to the memory of our first long sleep in another human being, our mother”.
Genesis dates back to the introduction of 4G technology, when the speed of the network began to submerge consciousness. In the countryside around Oxford, Max and Yulia reflect on how a monumental artistic work from Proust to Rothko, up to Bach’s Goldberg variations, designed to lullable the sleepless Count Keyserlingk can give another dimension to time. The meeting with the neuroscientist David Eagleman, author of the unknown Besseller: The Secret Lives of Our Brains, strengthens intuition. Eagleman explains: “We talked about rhythms in the brain and what happens when we fall asleep. Large and slow oscillations can be measured: neurons connect and operate in concert. We have considered the idea that playing music with that exact rhythm, could potentially help the brain and procure a better sleep”.
Richter collects the challenge: “I have always been very passionate about low frequency sounds. Working on Sleep was a white card to fully explore this sound world. In general, Sleep has a very articulated low frequency spectrum”. The piano, with its regular beats, is calibrated to “correspond to a perfect sleep cycle. But it is an experiment: if you really synchronize or not with your cycle, it is out of my control”.
The company is titanic. “Normally, when I make up, I work on one side and then I try to match all the pieces that the work is made. I realized very quickly that I could not do it with Sleep. It was too complex. So I changed perspective. There is a lot of music, in the Sleep, generated by the creative process itself. It was a discovery for me too”. Sleep soon becomes a phenomenon. The full performance eight and a half hours, with the public lying on beds are unique collective experiences: “These performances have been a different experience from all the others I experienced up to me up to that moment. With our music we accompany something that is happening in the room: hundreds of people, who have never met before, fall asleep together, trusting each other”. In the final, “in the last forty minutes I add higher frequencies. These frequencies wake up people”.
The success is sensational: over two billion streams, absolute primacy for an album labeled as classical music. But Richter doesn’t stop. It begins to experiment with reduced versions of 90 minutes, a duration that “is not arbitrary”, specifies Eagleman: “Ninety minutes is the time of a dream cycle: you descend into deep sleep with slow waves, then you go back to light sleep, you dream, and start again. Each cycle is about 90 minutes”. Sleep Circle is born from these executions, now published by Deutsche Grammophon in digital, CD and vinyl. In the booklet, Richter and Eagleman tell the story of Sleep (from there we took the statements in this article). The twenty -four songs of Sleep Circle condense the Sleep epic in a new architecture. “Some of these compositions, such as Dream 11 / Moth-like Stars or Non-Eternal, are rich in their poetic and musical nucleus. I wanted them to have lived even in a more traditional way. I first wrote a version for a traditional concert performance. Sleep Circle is based on these executions, which also means that it has a slightly different architecture. It is like Sleep Distilled”. Registered in the Richter Mahr studio in Oxfordshire, Sleep Circle proposes itself as a “journey in the hypnagogical state”, the space between vigil and sleep in which dreams begin to take shape. The exit was accompanied by two full performance at the Alexandra Palace in London, the largest ever made, to reiterate the link between the infinite dimension of Sleep and its new incarnation.
Ten years later, Richter confirms his poetics: “I think of sleep as a new daily beginning”. With Sleep Circle it offers our accelerated time another pause, “a resting place” where, once again, music seems to dream.