Max Richter ‎– Sleep

Imagine if this was on vinyl. ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀

Sleep CD1 and CD2 touched me from the first note on I heard of it. It needs quiet atmosphere, but evolves its power as well when played somewhere in the background.
It will draw your attention whenever it approaches you, your ear, your mind and everything beyond all that. When you open up, it takes you, it calms you, it carries you, it bears you, it reminds you ... until you feel... safe? Heard? Understood? Home?
Enjoy these sounds alone or with someone you feel linked to in whatever way. Join as two, cry as one and go on living with something deep in you, which you thought you have forgotten about,
now growing ...

When I first got this about ten days ago, it sounded flat, with little appeal, not the sweeping emotional upheaval I'd come to expect from Richter. Then I figured out what the problem was: me. I was trying to listen to it as one would any normal album. This is not any normal album. The answer's in the title. It runs to 8 hours. When you lay you down at night, turn the volume down to just-audible and press play, then see what happens. The magic will reveal itself, in your dreams, in the liminal twilight between mind, dreams and sleep, conscious and subconscious. Then you will wake up as Dream 0 (Till Break of Day) enters its sublime final phase, and it will all become clear, and you will not be able to stop the dewy morning tears from rolling down your cheeks, from duct to pillow. Now I play it every night, and even have time for yoga at dawn before it ends. MasterMasterpiece.

We are in an age in which art, and therefore language, and therefore the world itself, is finally reaching new ways, new codes, new horizons. Max Richter's 'Sleep' is one such artefact.