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Stories   >   Max Richter's 'Sleep' makes GQ's '10 ridiculously relaxing sleep albums to help you drift off'

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Max Richter's 'Sleep' makes GQ's '10 ridiculously relaxing sleep albums to help you drift off'

Posted: August 10, 2023

From Max Richter’s Sleep to Marconi Union’s Weightless, these calming compositions are just what you need. A guide to relaxing sleep music to help you drift off

GQ's Brit Dawson writes…Everyone has a different routine to wind down before going to sleep. There’s the widely-accepted Good, like a warm bath, reading, meditation, or a little stretch, and the regularly-warned-against Bad, for example, eating late, doom scrolling social media, or watching TV in bed.

Because bad habits die hard, even though we all know how important a good night’s sleep is to our mental and physical wellbeing, a lot of us are guilty of leaning into the latter much more than the former. Unwinding without a distraction can be particularly hard if you work from home, and your bedroom still feels like an office, even when it’s time for bed.

So, for those who can’t fall asleep in silence, or who need a little gentle stimulation to distract their mind, here’s our pick of 10 of the most calming, soothing, and sleep-inducing albums so you can finally get a proper night’s sleep.

Is it too on-the-nose to start with an album called Sleep? Well, no, because it’s called that for a reason. Max Richter’s concept album, which he describes as an eight-hour lullaby, aims to explore the effect of music on the sleeping brain, and was composed in collaboration with neuroscientist David Eagleman. As you might imagine, it’s a slow, soothing listen that comprises piano, gentle strings, and dream-inducing melodies to create ultimate calm. On its release, Richter performed the whole album live a handful of times, always playing overnight to an audience who watched from beds. Proof, then, that this is deep sleep-inducing music at its best.

From PR……SLEEP received its world premiere in Berlin September 2015, in a concert performance lasting from 12 midnight to 8am at which the audience will be given beds instead of seats and programmes. The eight-hour version is available as a digital album, and for those who prefer it, a one-hour adaptation of the work – from SLEEP – was released on CD, vinyl, download, and streaming formats, all through Deutsche Grammophon.

"You could say that the short one is meant to be listened to and the long one is meant to be heard while sleeping," says Richter, who describes the one-hour version as "a series of windows opening into the big piece".

Richter has most recently enjoyed acclaim at the Royal Opera House in London for his "lavishly atmospheric score" (The Guardian) for Wayne McGregor's ballet Woolf Works. Influenced equally by post-rock, classical music and the electronic avant-garde, he has composed and released five solo albums and "recomposed" Vivaldi's Four Seasons, which became a classical top-selling album in 2012.

Richter does not expect anyone to sit down and listen to SLEEP in its entirety, although some surely will. "It's really an experiment to try and understand how we experience music in different states of consciousness." He says he came up with the idea because of a long-standing fascination: "Sleeping is one of the most important things we all do," he says. "We spend a third of our lives asleep and it's always been one of my favourite things, ever since I was a child."

He consulted eminent American neuroscientist David Eagleman while composing, to learn more about how the human brain functions while sleeping. "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."

Coinciding as it does with the renewed interest in durational works within the fine art community, Richter says: "This isn't something new in music, it goes back to Cage, Terry Riley, and LaMonte Young,  and it's coming around again partly as a reaction to our speeded-up lives – we are all in need of a pause button."

Richter adds, "I'm perpetually curious about performance conventions in classical music, our rigid rules that dictate how and what music we can appreciate. Somehow in Europe over the last century, as complexity and inaccessibility in music became equated with intelligence and the avant-garde, we lost something along the way. Modernism gave us so many stunning works but we also lost our lullabies. We lost a shared communion in sound. Audiences have dwindled. All my pieces over the last few years have been exploring this, as does SLEEP. It's a very deliberate political statement for me."

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