Culture Watch: Sleep by Max Richter

It was a Saturday night and I was at London's Alexandra Palace venue for a performance of Sleep by Max Richter.

Richter is a composer who is known for tackling ambitious projects and exploring the complexity of landscape, environment, politics, and emotion.

Sleep was a project that Richter created in 2015. A collaboration with visual artist, Yulia Mahr, Sleep was created as an 8.5-hour listening experience designed to accompany a full night's rest. The score consists of 31 compositions, 20–30 minutes in duration, all based on variations of 4-5 themes. The music is calm, slow, and mellow, and composed for piano, cello, two violas, two violins, organ, soprano vocals, synthesisers, and electronics.

Richter released Sleep as a studio recording and has also occasionally performed the work as a live event in various venues around the world.

To mark the 10th anniversary of Sleep, two live event performances were held at Alexandra Palace in London. This was the first time that Sleep had been performed in London since 2017.

This is a huge space - the capacity for each night was 900 people, which I think is the largest performances of Sleep that Richter has so far undertaken.

The reason that Sleep was on my radar was that my cousin Nick was playing viola in these performances. Nick often plays with Richter and has been part of several of the previous live performances of Sleep.

I wasn't planning on going - tickets were expensive - but at the last minute, Nick managed to nab me a free ticket. This is one of the many reasons that he is my favourite cousin.

A live-event concert of Sleep is performed overnight. It's an immersive experience.

Doors opened at 8 PM and the performance was scheduled to start at 10 PM.

On arrival, I picked up my ticket and cleared security, then met up with Nick in the bar for a pre-show drink. This was the second of the two shows and Nick was upbeat but tired. Theoretically, he should have tried to get some sleep between the shows but instead he went to a rehearsal for an upcoming tour and also played at a wedding ceremony. He does not like to turn down work.

Walking into the performance space was surreal. The lighting eerie and grey, and the enormous space was filled with camp beds.

With migration constantly in the news, it brought to mind some kind of temporary accommodation refuge - almost as if we were in the middle of a disaster or security threat, or trying to survive on a distant planet.

I found my allocated bed and settled in. The mood was quiet, reverential. This is the perfect kind of event to come to by yourself - no one is really talking. Some people pushed their beds together so they could be close, but most people were just keeping to themselves, calm in their own space.

I didn't imagine that I would get much sleep. The camp bed wasn't super-comfortable and I wanted to take in as much of the experience as possible. Plus, I usually sleep naked, so I felt a bit constricted in the sweatpants and t-shirt that I'd worn in compliance with the event guidelines.

But I slept.

It wasn't a solid sleep - I was constantly drifting in and out of consciousness as the music played. It was a dream-like experience where you were immersed in the music.

Richter and his band weren't on stage playing constantly. They would appear from time to time to play a piece and then return to the green room. The spaces in between were filled with ambient sounds that were part of the overall composition.

At about 5:30 AM, with the performance drawing to a close, the band were on stage and the score built to a swelling sense of awakening. It was really quite incredible to feel the room full of people waking up around you, becoming conscious, connecting to the call of the music.

In a world where we all increasingly feel isolated and disconnected from each other, any sort of communal experience seems to have enormous power - an impact that resonates in ways that we didn't realise that we were missing. This was communal sleeping.

We can experience communal sleeping in lots of different settings - in a tent on a camping trip, at a slumber-party, or just sharing the bed with your boyfriend. But this kind of orchestrated, immersive communal sleeping was unlike anything that I've experienced before.

I met up with Nick once it was all over and we got a taxi together back into town. He was almost delirious with exhaustion, but happy - proud to have been part of something unique and special.

Nick only had a few hours to crawl into bed before flying to Italy that afternoon on a week-long tour. He really needed to get some Sleep.