Max Richter Introduces: SLEEP: Tranquility Base

Max Richter presents SLEEP: Tranquility Base, a thirty-minute EP of new SLEEP music, released today on Deutsche Grammophon ahead of World Sleep Day on 17 March. 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 an electronic perspective. “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 functions as a vessel that disconnects and travels through the body of work, allowing art to provide something which resembles 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 material drawn from outside 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

Max 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 that the music provides “a wish that the human body might be transformed into sound”, WSJ calling the record “haunting” and Crack saying that it’s “like fragments of half-remembered dreams”.

The SLEEP app is the product of a close collaboration between Max Richter, Deutsche Grammophon and Universal Music Germany’s Marketing Labs. The app was developed entirely in-house in Marketing Labs’ Consumer Development department. 

Marketing Labs is Universal Music Germany’s high-tech innovation and marketing department. It collaborates with labels, and services artists with products and campaigns with global scale and reach, as exemplified by the SLEEP app.