Hello, still 5 hours of sleep left from last week...
Today's artist is is a German-born British composer who has been an influential voice in post-minimalist composition and in the meeting of contemporary classical and alternative popular musical styles since the early 2000s. Richter is classically trained, having graduated in composition from the Royal Academy of Music and studied with Luciano Berio in Italy.Richter also composes music for stage, opera, ballet and screen. He has also collaborated with other musicians, as well as with performance, installation and media artists. He has recorded eight solo albums and his music is widely used in cinema. .......N-Joy
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Combining the discipline of his classical background with the inventive spirit of electronic music, Max Richter's work as a producer and composer speaks to -- and frequently critiques -- 21st century life in eloquent and evocative ways. On early masterworks such as 2002's Memoryhouse and 2003's The Blue Notebooks, he united his childhood memories and commentary on war's devastating aftermath into gorgeous, aching music; with 2015's eight-hour Sleep, he challenged the increasing disposability of art and music as well as audiences' ever-decreasing attention spans. Richter's fascination with the growing role of technology in everyday life was a major theme of releases spanning 2008's collection of bespoke ringtones to the music for a particularly paranoid 2016 episode of the TV series Black Mirror. Despite the high-concept nature of much of his work, Richter always maintains a powerful emotional connection with his listeners; 2012's Recomposed: The Four Seasons, an experimental reimagining of Vivaldi's violin concertos, topped classical charts in over 20 countries. The emotive quality of his music translated perfectly to scoring and soundtrack work, which ranged from documentaries such as Waltz with Bashir (2008); feature films including Mary Queen of Scots (2018); television series like Taboo (2017); and stage productions including Infra (2008) and Woolf Works (2015), both projects with Richter's longtime collaborator, choreographer Wayne McGregor. Richter's mix of modern composition, electronic music, and field recordings was as influential as it was innovative, and paved the way for like-minded artists such as Nico Muhly and Jóhann Jóhannsson.
Born in West Germany in the mid-'60s, Richter and his family moved to the U.K. when he was still a little boy, settling in the country town of Bedford. By his early teens, he was listening to the canon of classical music as well as modern composers including Philip Glass, whose music was a major influence on Richter. The Clash, the Beatles, and Pink Floyd were also important, along with the early electronic music scene; inspired by artists such as Kraftwerk, Richter built his own analog instruments. He studied composition and piano at Edinburgh University, the Royal Academy of Music, and in Florence with Luciano Berio. He then became a founding member of the Piano Circus, a contemporary classical group that played works by Glass, Brian Eno, Steve Reich, Arvo Pärt, and Julia Wolfe, and also incorporated found sounds and video into their performances. After ten years and five albums for Decca/Argo, Richter left the group and became more involved in the U.K.'s thriving electronic music scene, collaborating with the Future Sound of London on 1996's Dead Cities (which features a track named after him) and The Isness; he also contributed orchestrations to Roni Size's 2000 album In the Mode.
Richter's own work evolved from the Xenakis-inspired music of his early days into something that included his electronic and pop influences. His 2002 debut album, Memoryhouse, introduced his mix of modern composition, electronica, and field recordings. Recorded with the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra, the album explored childhood memories as well as the aftermath of the Kosovo War in the 1990s and was hailed as a masterpiece. Two years later, Richter made his FatCat debut with The Blue Notebooks, which incorporated readings from Franz Kafka's Blue Octavo Notebooks and Polish writer Czesław Miłosz by actress Tilda Swinton into dreamlike pieces for strings and piano that touched on the Iraq War and Richter's early years. Released in 2006, Songs from Before paired his plaintive sound with texts written by Haruki Murakami and delivered by Robert Wyatt. In 2008, he issued 24 Postcards in Full Colour, a collection of intricate ringtones envisioned by Richter as a way to connect people around the world. That year also saw the release of his music for Ari Folman's Golden Globe-winning film Waltz with Bashir. Focusing on electronics instead of a typical orchestral score, it was Richter's highest-profile soundtrack project to date. He then worked on several other film scores, including music for Benedek Fliegauf's Womb, Alex Gibney's My Trip to Al-Qaeda, and David MacKenzie's Perfect Sense. Another scoring project, Infra, marked the beginning of Richter's enduring collaboration with choreographer Wayne McGregor. Commissioned by the Royal Ballet in 2008, Infra was a ballet inspired by by T.S. Eliot's classic poem "The Wasteland," and the the 2005 London terrorist bombings. Richter re-recorded and expanded his music for the 2010 album Infra, his fourth release for FatCat Records.
Richter began the 2010s with soundtrack work that included the award-winning scores to Die Fremde (2010) and Lore (2012). The composer reunited with McGregor for 2012's Sum, a chamber opera based on Sum: Forty Tales of the Afterlives, a collection of short stories by neuroscientist David Eagleman about the possibility of life after death. That year also saw the release of one of Richter's most popular albums, Recomposed by Max Richter: Vivaldi - The Four Seasons. An avant-garde, loop-based reworking of the composer's timeless set of violin concertos, it topped the classical charts in 22 countries, including the U.K., the U.S., and Germany. In turn, McGregor choreographed a ballet, Kairos, to Richter's recomposition. Disconnect, the score to Henry-Alex Rubin's film about the impact of technology on relationships, arrived in 2013. His other releases that year included the score to Wadjda, which was the first feature-length film made by a Saudi Arabian woman (director Haifaa Al-Mansour); the music to Ritesh Batra's The Lunchbox and Ruairí Robinson's sci-fi excursion The Last Days on Mars. Richter also worked with Folman again on the music to The Congress, an adaptation of Stanislaw Lem's novel The Futurological Congress.
In 2014, Richter launched a mentorship program for aspiring young composers and wrote music for HBO's The Leftovers, which also featured pieces from Memoryhouse and The Blue Notebooks. The following year saw the arrival of Sleep, an eight-hour ambient piece scored for piano, strings, electronics, and vocals that Richter described as a "lullaby for a frenetic world and a manifesto for a slower pace of existence." The piece premiered at a Berlin performance where the audience was given beds instead of seats. Sleep and From Sleep, a one-hour adaptation, were released in September 2015. The following year, Richter provided the score to the sci-fi/horror film Morgan and the disturbingly cheery music for "Nosedive," an episode of Black Mirror that took the all-consuming nature of social media to extremes. Released in January 2017, Three Worlds: Music from Woolf Works drew from his score for McGregor's 2015 Royal Ballet production inspired by three of Virginia Woolf's most acclaimed novels. It was followed that May by the soundtrack compilation Out of the Dark Room. That September, Richter's Emmy-nominated music for the BBC One drama Taboo was released.
Richter remained busy on soundtrack work in 2018, with projects including the music for the HBO TV series My Brilliant Friend as well as the scores to films like Hostiles, White Boy Rick, and Mary Queen of Scots, which won a Best Original Score -- Feature Film Award at the Hollywood Music in Media Awards. In October 2019, Deutsche Grammophon issued Voyager: Essential Max Richter, an expansive retrospective that included two previously unreleased pieces written for Sleep.
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It seems that the regiment of sleeping concerts has arrived - meet the neoclassical interpretation of the concept of sleeping music from the British maestro of keys and strings.In fact, the public has heard such things many times already, so the idea, by itself, is far (and not at all) new, but it was most often static ambient things, and here the instrumental version is presented exactly the same as, at least, original at most - it sounds very intriguing.
In 2015, Max Richter released his most ambitious project to date, Sleep, an 8.5 hour listening experience targeted to fit a full night's rest. The album itself contains 31 compositions, some reaching 20-30 minutes in duration, all based around variations of 4-5 themes. The music is calm, slow, mellow and composed for Piano, Cello, 2 Violas, 2 Violins, Organ, Soprano vocals, Synthesisers and Electronics. As the album's liner notes, Strings are played by the American Contemporary Music Ensemble (Ben Russell, Yuki Numata Resnik, Caleb Burhans, Clarice Jensen and Brian Snow), Vocals are provided by Grace Davidson and the Piano, Synthesisers and Electronics are played by Richter himself.
According to Richter, as described in the album's credits, Sleep is "an eight-hour lullaby", "a piece that is meant to be listened to at night ... structured as a large set of variations." Richter conferred with American neuroscientist David Eagleman while working on the album's piece to learn about how the brain functions during sleep. Richter stated, "Sleeping is one of the most important things we all do ... We spend a third of our lives asleep and it's always been one of my favourite things, ever since I was a child. ... For me, Sleep is an attempt to see how that space when your conscious mind is on holiday can be a place for music to live."
The album was performed in its entirety as one compositional piece at the Reading Room at Wellcome Collection in London, England, on September 27, 2015 from midnight to 8:00 AM as the climax of the BBC Radio 3 "Science and Music" weekend.The performance broke several records, including the longest live broadcast of a single piece of music in BBC Radio 3's station's history. The performance also set Guinness World Records for longest broadcast of a single piece of music and longest live broadcast of a single piece of music.Instead of chairs to sit in and watch the performance, audience members were given beds to sleep in
Sleep was performed for its first outdoor performance and largest performance to-date in Los Angeles, CA on July 27-28th and July 28-29th, 2018, starting shortly after 10:30pm. It was performed in Grand Park, across from the Los Angeles Music Center. Each performance had 560 beds and was timed so the final movement, "Dream 0 (till break of day)" would occur at dawn. Richter played along with members of the American Contemporary Music Ensemble, Clarice Jensen (cello), Ben Russell, Andrew Tholl (violin), Isabel Hagen (viola), Emily Brausa (cello), and Grace Davidson (soprano).
Max Richter - Sleep IV (flac 234mb)
401 Constellation 1 6:56
402 Constellation 2 15:20
403 Space 2 (Slow Waves) 7:42
404 Chorale / Glow 25:45
xxxxx
Max Richter - Sleep V (flac 274mb)
501 Dream 19 (Pulse) 18:53
502 Cassiopeia 19:36
503 Non-eternal 23:50
504 Song / Echo 5:13
xxxxx
Max Richter - Sleep VI (flac 278mb)
601 Aria 2 11:02
602 Never Fade Into Nothingness 9:41
603 Return 16 (Time Capsule) 24:25
604 If You Came This Way 14:37
xxxxx
Max Richter - Sleep VII+VIII ( flac 448mb)
701 Space 17 (Chains) 18:03
702 Sublunar 25:36
801 Dream 17 (Alpha) 28:47
802 Dream 0 (Till Break Of Day) 33:47
xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx
The release of Sleep was accompanied by a one-hour album, From Sleep, with seven additional tracks, not present on the eight-hour release, recorded during the same sessions. From Sleep was promoted by music videos for three tracks: "Dream 13 (Minus Even)," "Path 5 (Delta)" and "Dream 3 (In the Midst of My Life) If you're listening to From Sleep for the full benefits of Sleep (relaxtion, sleeping aid, metaphysical experience), I don't think it works as well in abridged form. I found the changes from one piece to the next to be too drastic to tune out. That being said, From Sleep is still a gorgeous collection of ambient pieces and, if you haven't the financial or mental wherewithal for Sleep, a worthy summation of its themes.
Max Richter - From Sleep + Bonus (flac 303mb)
01 Dream 3 (In The Midst Of My Life)10:04
02 Path 5 (Delta)11:14
03 Space 11 (Invisible Pages Over) 5:16
04 Dream 13 (Minus Even) 8:53
05 Space 21 (Petrichor) 4:48
06 Path 19 (Yet Frailest) 7:51
07 Dream 8 (Late And Soon) 11:53
Rough Trade Shops Special Edition
08 Selene 11:39
09 Diffraction Sequence 4:21
10 Origins (ursa major) 16:02
xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx
Today's artist is is a German-born British composer who has been an influential voice in post-minimalist composition and in the meeting of contemporary classical and alternative popular musical styles since the early 2000s. Richter is classically trained, having graduated in composition from the Royal Academy of Music and studied with Luciano Berio in Italy.Richter also composes music for stage, opera, ballet and screen. He has also collaborated with other musicians, as well as with performance, installation and media artists. He has recorded eight solo albums and his music is widely used in cinema. .......N-Joy
xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx
Combining the discipline of his classical background with the inventive spirit of electronic music, Max Richter's work as a producer and composer speaks to -- and frequently critiques -- 21st century life in eloquent and evocative ways. On early masterworks such as 2002's Memoryhouse and 2003's The Blue Notebooks, he united his childhood memories and commentary on war's devastating aftermath into gorgeous, aching music; with 2015's eight-hour Sleep, he challenged the increasing disposability of art and music as well as audiences' ever-decreasing attention spans. Richter's fascination with the growing role of technology in everyday life was a major theme of releases spanning 2008's collection of bespoke ringtones to the music for a particularly paranoid 2016 episode of the TV series Black Mirror. Despite the high-concept nature of much of his work, Richter always maintains a powerful emotional connection with his listeners; 2012's Recomposed: The Four Seasons, an experimental reimagining of Vivaldi's violin concertos, topped classical charts in over 20 countries. The emotive quality of his music translated perfectly to scoring and soundtrack work, which ranged from documentaries such as Waltz with Bashir (2008); feature films including Mary Queen of Scots (2018); television series like Taboo (2017); and stage productions including Infra (2008) and Woolf Works (2015), both projects with Richter's longtime collaborator, choreographer Wayne McGregor. Richter's mix of modern composition, electronic music, and field recordings was as influential as it was innovative, and paved the way for like-minded artists such as Nico Muhly and Jóhann Jóhannsson.
Born in West Germany in the mid-'60s, Richter and his family moved to the U.K. when he was still a little boy, settling in the country town of Bedford. By his early teens, he was listening to the canon of classical music as well as modern composers including Philip Glass, whose music was a major influence on Richter. The Clash, the Beatles, and Pink Floyd were also important, along with the early electronic music scene; inspired by artists such as Kraftwerk, Richter built his own analog instruments. He studied composition and piano at Edinburgh University, the Royal Academy of Music, and in Florence with Luciano Berio. He then became a founding member of the Piano Circus, a contemporary classical group that played works by Glass, Brian Eno, Steve Reich, Arvo Pärt, and Julia Wolfe, and also incorporated found sounds and video into their performances. After ten years and five albums for Decca/Argo, Richter left the group and became more involved in the U.K.'s thriving electronic music scene, collaborating with the Future Sound of London on 1996's Dead Cities (which features a track named after him) and The Isness; he also contributed orchestrations to Roni Size's 2000 album In the Mode.
Richter's own work evolved from the Xenakis-inspired music of his early days into something that included his electronic and pop influences. His 2002 debut album, Memoryhouse, introduced his mix of modern composition, electronica, and field recordings. Recorded with the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra, the album explored childhood memories as well as the aftermath of the Kosovo War in the 1990s and was hailed as a masterpiece. Two years later, Richter made his FatCat debut with The Blue Notebooks, which incorporated readings from Franz Kafka's Blue Octavo Notebooks and Polish writer Czesław Miłosz by actress Tilda Swinton into dreamlike pieces for strings and piano that touched on the Iraq War and Richter's early years. Released in 2006, Songs from Before paired his plaintive sound with texts written by Haruki Murakami and delivered by Robert Wyatt. In 2008, he issued 24 Postcards in Full Colour, a collection of intricate ringtones envisioned by Richter as a way to connect people around the world. That year also saw the release of his music for Ari Folman's Golden Globe-winning film Waltz with Bashir. Focusing on electronics instead of a typical orchestral score, it was Richter's highest-profile soundtrack project to date. He then worked on several other film scores, including music for Benedek Fliegauf's Womb, Alex Gibney's My Trip to Al-Qaeda, and David MacKenzie's Perfect Sense. Another scoring project, Infra, marked the beginning of Richter's enduring collaboration with choreographer Wayne McGregor. Commissioned by the Royal Ballet in 2008, Infra was a ballet inspired by by T.S. Eliot's classic poem "The Wasteland," and the the 2005 London terrorist bombings. Richter re-recorded and expanded his music for the 2010 album Infra, his fourth release for FatCat Records.
Richter began the 2010s with soundtrack work that included the award-winning scores to Die Fremde (2010) and Lore (2012). The composer reunited with McGregor for 2012's Sum, a chamber opera based on Sum: Forty Tales of the Afterlives, a collection of short stories by neuroscientist David Eagleman about the possibility of life after death. That year also saw the release of one of Richter's most popular albums, Recomposed by Max Richter: Vivaldi - The Four Seasons. An avant-garde, loop-based reworking of the composer's timeless set of violin concertos, it topped the classical charts in 22 countries, including the U.K., the U.S., and Germany. In turn, McGregor choreographed a ballet, Kairos, to Richter's recomposition. Disconnect, the score to Henry-Alex Rubin's film about the impact of technology on relationships, arrived in 2013. His other releases that year included the score to Wadjda, which was the first feature-length film made by a Saudi Arabian woman (director Haifaa Al-Mansour); the music to Ritesh Batra's The Lunchbox and Ruairí Robinson's sci-fi excursion The Last Days on Mars. Richter also worked with Folman again on the music to The Congress, an adaptation of Stanislaw Lem's novel The Futurological Congress.
In 2014, Richter launched a mentorship program for aspiring young composers and wrote music for HBO's The Leftovers, which also featured pieces from Memoryhouse and The Blue Notebooks. The following year saw the arrival of Sleep, an eight-hour ambient piece scored for piano, strings, electronics, and vocals that Richter described as a "lullaby for a frenetic world and a manifesto for a slower pace of existence." The piece premiered at a Berlin performance where the audience was given beds instead of seats. Sleep and From Sleep, a one-hour adaptation, were released in September 2015. The following year, Richter provided the score to the sci-fi/horror film Morgan and the disturbingly cheery music for "Nosedive," an episode of Black Mirror that took the all-consuming nature of social media to extremes. Released in January 2017, Three Worlds: Music from Woolf Works drew from his score for McGregor's 2015 Royal Ballet production inspired by three of Virginia Woolf's most acclaimed novels. It was followed that May by the soundtrack compilation Out of the Dark Room. That September, Richter's Emmy-nominated music for the BBC One drama Taboo was released.
Richter remained busy on soundtrack work in 2018, with projects including the music for the HBO TV series My Brilliant Friend as well as the scores to films like Hostiles, White Boy Rick, and Mary Queen of Scots, which won a Best Original Score -- Feature Film Award at the Hollywood Music in Media Awards. In October 2019, Deutsche Grammophon issued Voyager: Essential Max Richter, an expansive retrospective that included two previously unreleased pieces written for Sleep.
xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx
It seems that the regiment of sleeping concerts has arrived - meet the neoclassical interpretation of the concept of sleeping music from the British maestro of keys and strings.In fact, the public has heard such things many times already, so the idea, by itself, is far (and not at all) new, but it was most often static ambient things, and here the instrumental version is presented exactly the same as, at least, original at most - it sounds very intriguing.
In 2015, Max Richter released his most ambitious project to date, Sleep, an 8.5 hour listening experience targeted to fit a full night's rest. The album itself contains 31 compositions, some reaching 20-30 minutes in duration, all based around variations of 4-5 themes. The music is calm, slow, mellow and composed for Piano, Cello, 2 Violas, 2 Violins, Organ, Soprano vocals, Synthesisers and Electronics. As the album's liner notes, Strings are played by the American Contemporary Music Ensemble (Ben Russell, Yuki Numata Resnik, Caleb Burhans, Clarice Jensen and Brian Snow), Vocals are provided by Grace Davidson and the Piano, Synthesisers and Electronics are played by Richter himself.
According to Richter, as described in the album's credits, Sleep is "an eight-hour lullaby", "a piece that is meant to be listened to at night ... structured as a large set of variations." Richter conferred with American neuroscientist David Eagleman while working on the album's piece to learn about how the brain functions during sleep. Richter stated, "Sleeping is one of the most important things we all do ... We spend a third of our lives asleep and it's always been one of my favourite things, ever since I was a child. ... For me, Sleep is an attempt to see how that space when your conscious mind is on holiday can be a place for music to live."
The album was performed in its entirety as one compositional piece at the Reading Room at Wellcome Collection in London, England, on September 27, 2015 from midnight to 8:00 AM as the climax of the BBC Radio 3 "Science and Music" weekend.The performance broke several records, including the longest live broadcast of a single piece of music in BBC Radio 3's station's history. The performance also set Guinness World Records for longest broadcast of a single piece of music and longest live broadcast of a single piece of music.Instead of chairs to sit in and watch the performance, audience members were given beds to sleep in
Sleep was performed for its first outdoor performance and largest performance to-date in Los Angeles, CA on July 27-28th and July 28-29th, 2018, starting shortly after 10:30pm. It was performed in Grand Park, across from the Los Angeles Music Center. Each performance had 560 beds and was timed so the final movement, "Dream 0 (till break of day)" would occur at dawn. Richter played along with members of the American Contemporary Music Ensemble, Clarice Jensen (cello), Ben Russell, Andrew Tholl (violin), Isabel Hagen (viola), Emily Brausa (cello), and Grace Davidson (soprano).
Max Richter - Sleep IV (flac 234mb)
401 Constellation 1 6:56
402 Constellation 2 15:20
403 Space 2 (Slow Waves) 7:42
404 Chorale / Glow 25:45
xxxxx
Max Richter - Sleep V (flac 274mb)
501 Dream 19 (Pulse) 18:53
502 Cassiopeia 19:36
503 Non-eternal 23:50
504 Song / Echo 5:13
xxxxx
Max Richter - Sleep VI (flac 278mb)
601 Aria 2 11:02
602 Never Fade Into Nothingness 9:41
603 Return 16 (Time Capsule) 24:25
604 If You Came This Way 14:37
xxxxx
Max Richter - Sleep VII+VIII ( flac 448mb)
701 Space 17 (Chains) 18:03
702 Sublunar 25:36
801 Dream 17 (Alpha) 28:47
802 Dream 0 (Till Break Of Day) 33:47
xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx
The release of Sleep was accompanied by a one-hour album, From Sleep, with seven additional tracks, not present on the eight-hour release, recorded during the same sessions. From Sleep was promoted by music videos for three tracks: "Dream 13 (Minus Even)," "Path 5 (Delta)" and "Dream 3 (In the Midst of My Life) If you're listening to From Sleep for the full benefits of Sleep (relaxtion, sleeping aid, metaphysical experience), I don't think it works as well in abridged form. I found the changes from one piece to the next to be too drastic to tune out. That being said, From Sleep is still a gorgeous collection of ambient pieces and, if you haven't the financial or mental wherewithal for Sleep, a worthy summation of its themes.
Max Richter - From Sleep + Bonus (flac 303mb)
01 Dream 3 (In The Midst Of My Life)10:04
02 Path 5 (Delta)11:14
03 Space 11 (Invisible Pages Over) 5:16
04 Dream 13 (Minus Even) 8:53
05 Space 21 (Petrichor) 4:48
06 Path 19 (Yet Frailest) 7:51
07 Dream 8 (Late And Soon) 11:53
Rough Trade Shops Special Edition
08 Selene 11:39
09 Diffraction Sequence 4:21
10 Origins (ursa major) 16:02
xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx
Much appreciated, Rho. Thank you.
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