SLEEP Circle

Composer and pianist Max Richter’s upcoming album Sleep Circle is the newly recorded and abridged version of Richter’s 2015 project Sleep. Sleep Circle is informed by the experience of his concert performances of the original album.   

Today, Sleep has become one of the most streamed classical compositions, heard nightly by millions of people around the world. Over the years, Richter has not only performed the entire eight-hour long Sleep cycle for audiences lying in beds, ready to drift off into slumber, but he also began performing an abridged, 90-minutes long version in selected venues. Inspired by these concert experiences, this new abridged version Sleep Circle focuses on the movements within the composition that are more in the foreground, which makes it a hallucinatory 90-minute trip into the hypnagogic state.   

For Richter, the approach offered new insights into his epic composition: “Some of these compositions, such as Dream 11, Moth-like Stars or Non-Eternal, are so rich in their poetic core that I wanted the music to be experienced in a more traditional way. I first wrote a structure for a concert performance. The new version we’ve recorded now is based on these performances, which also means that it has a slightly different architecture. It’s like Sleep distilled.”