Max Richter today releases SLEEP: Tranquility Base, a thirty minute EP of new SLEEP music ahead of World Sleep Day on March 17th. Remixes will come from electronic musician Kelly Lee Owens and German sound artist Alva Noto.
Richter returns to his celebrated eight-hour magnum opus SLEEP with this new EP which offers a glimpse into the original material from a more electronic standpoint. ‘Tranquility Base’ is the site on the Moon where, in July 1969, humans landed and walked on a celestial body other than Earth for the first time. With this in mind, the EP stands as a vessel to disconnect and travel through the body of work allowing art to hopefully provide something similar to peace within ourselves.
Richter’s SLEEP app to date has had over 350K downloads and today the FOCUS section of the app has been updated. The update includes added music from SLEEP: Tranquility Base and music from across Richter’s repertoire. This is the first time music from outside of the SLEEP project has been included.
“SLEEP is a kind of counter argument to what’s going on in the world. Yulia and I have talked about it as protest music. It’s a sort of alternative proposition to how things could be or how things are… towards the world we’re living in and helps to shine a light on the things we can do better.
The original thing which made us want to make this piece was a sense of being oversaturated - with data, with information - overstimulated… All of that is just worse now, there’s more of the same - much more of the same - and that makes the piece continually relevant.” - Max Richter.
Richter is renowned for his ability to translate profound human emotions into music. With his catalogue now surpassing 3-billion streams, he continues to set the standard for what is possible for composers in the 21st century. The original SLEEP record is the most streamed classical record of all time with The New Yorker stating the music provides ‘a wish that the human body might be transformed into sound’, WSJ calling the record ‘haunting’ and Crack that it’s ‘like fragments of half-remembered dreams’.
The EP artwork is creative directed by Alex Hunting Studio with CGI by Dada Projects.