DEEPER TALKS TO MAX RICHTER

We spoke to the composer about sleep science, the perception of ambient music and the need for us to slow down and disconnect

Contemporary minimalist composer Max Richter has written a entitled Sleep which is eight hours in length and designed to soundtrack a night of slumber.

Richter describes the piece as “an eight-hour personal lullaby for a frenetic world and a manifesto for a slower pace of existence”. The piece is scored for piano, strings, electronics and vocals. It is warm yet haunting and melancholic, while moving at a glacial pace.

The German-born British composer said something during our conversation that stuck with me: “I think time is a preoccupation right now.” This brought a documentary about Marina Abramovic – The Artist Is Present – to mind. The film, released in 2012 chronicles a retrospective at MOMA and features a 736-hour static, silent performance piece, which sees Abramovic sitting immobile in the museum’s atrium during opening hours while spectators were invited to take turns sitting opposite her. As people stared back at her, some for a few minute, some for hours, many began to cry or describe a feeling of transcendence afterwards.

Richter has previously described his music in the terms of story telling but this time, with Sleep, still his most ambitious piece to date, it’s like he’s deliberately left pages of the story book blank. It’s as if a projector with no film is beaming a hazy light onto a blank cinema screen for you to project your dreams onto.

DEEPER INTO MOVIES: I remember reading stories of Aphex Twin going for two to three days without sleep and working in lucid dreaming states during the recording of Selected Ambient Works 2. It got me wondering what was your writing process like for this piece?

RICHTER: I’ve always written at night – my working day for years was around 9pm to 2am – though I do keep more regular hours these days. So in that respect this project was no different from usual. In terms of how the music developed, it was my normal process, which I would say is really a hybrid process of sketching on bits of paper, playing the piano, playing synthesisers, using the computer, staring out of the window, finding things I’d forgotten about, happy accidents, failed plans, best intentions, equipment failures. It is a multidimensional process incorporating a lot of planning and intention and a lot of randomness. Ultimately I just follow the material where it wants to go a lot of the time