Max Richter
Sleep

Notes from SLEEP OF TIRED CIVILIZATION
"When he woke up, the dinosaur was still there" (Augusto Monterroso)

Zoo of Naples. The Zero Years of 2000. Europe after the rain. Often in the late afternoon, I would take the subway from Piazza Dante or Piazza Cavour to reach Piazza Vanvitelli in Vomero to visit music stores, usually Fonoteca or FNAC. I always traveled with earbuds, always electronic music, something that gave me the idea of iron and technology that I used to move, passing through it, covered in noise. I would always find myself observing and thinking about the people on the train. I watched them in winter huddling from the cold, pulling up the hoods of their sweatshirts, falling asleep exhausted with their heads lolling or bumping against the windows after long and exhausting days of work. I watched them resist sleepiness and then be overcome by it, I stared at all those eyes closing with the softness of a cat half-closing and yawning, I observed the cold and condensation that could even make us intimate. A desire for torpor gripped me and I realized how we were all, after all, part of a civilization now tired. I thought of interior worlds that cannot be communicated. And then I continued to imagine. I imagined that exhausted and afflicted cleaning woman after a day of work, I imagined her once home preparing food for her young children, dining, washing, tidying and then putting them to bed. I imagined her taking a shower and then finally going to bed, too, with her man or alone, I imagined her enjoying a languor on her, I imagined toes poking into holes in the sheets as in Sartre's Intimacy. A private intimacy whose knowledge was reserved only for her and her closest loved ones. Her sleep and the wheel that would start turning again the next morning, only a few hours later.
I imagined seeing them all asleep on those trains, all spirits dissolved into the air.

This human race that adores clocks and does not know time, metronomic civilization that loses contact and control of those chronometers it buys, that despite imposed timings cannot keep up with the seconds it chases, slaving away in activities they often don't care about. Chronic and chronological society, full of artificial lighting where sleep and rest are often considered almost an enemy that hinders productivity. An obese and dry corporation in asthmatic and mournful pursuit of a kind of industrial New Age. The corporation that feels the need for drugs, zones of gray decompression, but that would also need moments of clarity, free from excitement dependencies, more serotonin than adrenaline, freed to finally enjoy the brightness of the morning light. I spent almost every weekend at my partner’s place, at Cavone. On Monday morning I went back to my place on Via Duomo. Along the way, I passed under the Conservatory of San Pietro a Majella. Sensing for a few moments a piano phrase, some violin or flute notes, or a voice through those walls and hearing them resonate in the street always put me in a good mood and the day seemed brighter and more worth living.
Upon leaving some bookstore, to those offering me mediocre Indian survival books, I always replied, no thanks, I personally prefer Mitteleuropean gloom.
I always studied at night, a very personal vision of situationism: low lights in the corners, candles, laptop at the side, books on the desk illuminated by a lawyer's lamp, then the smell of pencils, dry and fluorescent highlighters, Bic ink, paper, coffee, and smoke, and lots of instrumental music, mainly classical, soundtracks, and chamber electronics.

Max Richter is a German composer, British by adoption. His name is quite well known and precious. Even with completely different paths, his acoustic constellation could somehow be akin to Basinski's. He passed through Florence, at Luciano Berio's TEMPO REALE school, for a few years, he was part of the ensemble that collaborated with Arvo Pärt, Brian Eno, Philip Glass, Julia Wolfe, Steve Reich. An impressive resume.
He collaborated with FUTURE SOUND OF LONDON, handled the soundtracks for Black Mirror (Nosedive) and The Leftovers among others, created a reinterpretation of Vivaldi's The Four Seasons, released albums of aching and sublime beauty such as The Blue Notebooks, one of the most relevant backdrops for a winter season, Memoryhouse, which is like a tender and trembling kiss from an elderly person, 24 Postcards in Full Colour, brief notes contemplating life flying away.
His music often accompanied me during those AM study sessions.
SLEEP (2015) is a work conceived to be listened to during sleep hours, a chamber lullaby of just over eight hours for rest from this world always in a hurry, always late. Its release for Deutsche Grammophon was accompanied by a one-hour reduction (from SLEEP), designed for waking hours, which reprised all the main themes from the complete work and a remix album curated by people like Mogwai and Digitonal. A work that harkens back to certain experiments by Terry Riley, to precursors like Raymond Scott's Soothing Sounds for Baby (1964), and to pioneering works like Bach's Goldberg Variations, commissioned as a cure for insomnia. SLEEP is a long composition to be listened to from midnight to eight in the morning. A nocturnal, lunar and muffled sound, for piano, organ, synthesizer, string quintet, and electronics. Few themes, several variations, drones, and an inclination towards the stars. Cellos rise, a soprano enters. Echoes of melodies that could last beyond infinity, Liszt's Consolations revisited and revered, slowed-down romanticism until it dilates, static time, Tempo Lounge, slow-motion nostalgia, few notes, just what is needed.
Presented live on a few occasions and performed in its entirety, in some of these, the audience instead of chairs was made to sit on mattresses intended for listening. SLEEP is a cinematic flow, precisely in the sense of writing movement. Sublunar is probably its zenith.
Night is the time for questions and for challenging usual answers. The music ends, only the computer's hum remains. Overnights Delicatessence.

The Decline of Western Civilization (1981). The decline continued passing through the eighties. Casio quartz digital watches, the first VHS tapes. The individual, their brain, the Rubik's Cube, dead air conditioning, Nash's equilibrium, Game Theory, nuclear power, London's smog, the 24 hours, the non-stop weeks. Starless vertical architecture, accountants with rain-filled bottles buying and selling the soul, accounting firms, daily stop'n'go that kill you, NGOs and the Third Orality, hospital elevators, express pizzas, the Daily Specials. Night stress, sleep therapy, slow-wave sleep, excessive daytime sleepiness, sleep apneas, narcolepsy, circadian rhythm, parasomnias or Sleep Disorders, psychotropics, sedatives, scientific articles, sleepless nights, White Nights, bad nights, nights spent alone, restless nights wondering how much the Media influence people's nighttime dreams, millions of alarms that never stop ringing simultaneously and, in the morning, a Have a Nice Day with a voice that is the absolute voice of death as in THIS IS WATER.

There is a silent global sect, a sect that stays out of the cliché that worships the summer sun while it cooks you in a double boiler. That hates that suffocating season, perhaps because, with Senada, it's easier to reason in lower temperatures. That keeps well away from certain light and boring undertakings. That loves rainy summers, wet nature, the night and sleep capable of resetting time.
Its silent longing is that of De-Siderare. The Rain People: NEUROPAX.

Seafront of Salerno, towards the end of the early Years of the Third Millennium, today. January and February are secular months, my favorites. I like the rain, it makes me feel protected. I often find myself thinking, reading novels, watching films, photos, paintings, about how certain images enchant me and yet how I can't enjoy similar situations, when I should be the protagonist of those idealized frames that give me a warm feeling. I often think of the cover of A Woman As a Friend by Battisti and I wish I could see myself like that. I developed a crush for that cover, while at the same time I sometimes think it's the image of my unease and dissatisfaction. I look at it and think of flipping through greasy newspapers rented with brioche sugar and stained with coffee, to humidity percentages, to wrapping oneself up in coats and nevertheless enjoying the cold.
I was born in 1981, I grew up among women in a small hamlet, grandmothers, aunts, my mother. I listened to hundreds of hours of Radio Dramas as a child, I was fascinated by the grain of the voices coming from the device. I got to see the transition from analog to the ongoing digital revolution, from paper to electronic writing. When I was little, sometimes the power would go out for hours, then all those women would collect all the candles they had available, some already burned halfway down, and we would all gather, women and children, in one room full of those lights and talk and tell stories. Hours passed and this is one of the memories of my childhood to which I'm most attached. Then I became an adult.
I often arrived in the city early in the morning, it was cold outside. I was on warm buses with heating, and watched the homeless who had spent the night in the frost and wet leaves and became baffled.
Then a run and a night in hospital and 23 months later.
Radio Harlem and the Big Beat and recordings like these that are sonic entities.
SLEEP is a timeless suite to listen to on a Friday night. After relaxing with a warm bath, putting on comfortable clothes and enjoying the night, seated on a couch looking out. A cure after a week of work, for those lucky enough to have one (hopefully without being enslaved to it - let it never be asking too much -), having, hopefully, the next day free.
Enjoying a long listen on a stormy night.
Sliding into sleep like that, then tomorrow we will see.
Feeling Kinda Lonely Underneath The Strobe... Night motif.