About 10 years ago, one of the most interesting and ambitious music projects called Sleep, a composition made of eight and half hour of music, was released by the renowned German-born British composer and pianist Max Richter, reaching the remarkable goal to be the first classical composition to reach 1 billion streams worldwide.
When this magniloquent record was originally planned, the intent of the pianist and composer was to create a journey into a human mind during the sleeping cycle, more specifically, between wakefulness and sleep, where our minds create dreams.
To celebrate the 10th Anniversary of one of Richter’s most imaginative projects to date, Max Richter set up two special concerts in the beginning in September in London, solely dedicated to Sleep, where the Alexandra Palace venue in London was transformed into an auditorium containing 900 beds and glowing lamps, where the audience was invited to relax on the beds provided to the audience by the artist for the next 8 and a half hours, while Richter and his collective performed the whole of Sleep on stage, in an ambience that some of the members of the crowd described as “Healing”.
At the same time, as an extra way of celebrating Sleep's special anniversary, Richter also decided to release a more condensed 90-minutes version of Sleep, called Sleep Circle, where Richter picked carefully 24 tracks off his monumental body of work that could better reflect the nature of Richter’s project, where compositions like Non-Eternal and Dream 11/ Moth-Like Stars were purposely placed sequentially to re-create and mirror the 90-minute REM cycle of an average human being.
Sleep Circle, like its opulent generator Sleep, feels like an almost out-of-body experience, where the listeners get to evade from the incessant and often stressful daytime routine and reconnect with themselves emotionally, in a sensorial ride that bring them in a calming, somehow hypnagogic state, where peacefulness becomes the center of the individual’s universe once again.
Recorded at Studio Richter Mahr in Oxfordshire, Richter’s Sleep Circle reinstates once again why Max Richter is considered one of the most inspired contemporary pianists and composers worldwide.
What makes Richter being a unique artist, in his field, it’s not only the amount of class and talent that he applies in each of his bodies of work, but also that thoughtfulness of putting the listeners at the forefront of his compositions, by ensuring that they get the best and most sensorial experience possible off each of Max Richter’s record.
Even after 10 years from its release and intended, perhaps, to reframe the concept behind the record in a bit more innermost fashion, Sleep Circle (and Sleep too, of course) still resonates to these days to Richter’s many fans for the kind of intimacy the music creates between the listeners themselves and the composer, building a sonic bridge that goes beyond music, to reach spirituality.
A well accomplished record from one of the best in the business, no doubts.
Sleep Circle is out now and he is available to be purchased via Deutsche Grammophon
