Penn: Morning Album Reviews —  Max Richter (Finale Part three, day seven)

I refuse to end on a fucking ranking, so here’s Parts 1, 2, and 3, based again on whim, revised for sheer impishness, and fiddled further for what’s damn near approaching intentional malice:

* Pet Shop Boys, Electric
Radiohead, OK Computer
the B-52s, Cosmic Thing
Seeming, The Birdwatcher’s Guide to Atrocity
the Mars Volta, De-Loused in the Comatorium
* Nirvana, In Utero
* Kendrick Lamar, good kid, m.A.A.d city
Dave Matthews Band, Under the Table and Dreaming
the Mountain Goats, The Sunset Tree
the Beatles’ Help!
* Britney Spears, Blackout
the Glitch Mob, See Without Eyes
Paula Abdul, Forever Your Girl
* Jump, Little Children, Magazine
Merzbow, Scene
* Max Richter, Sleep
Aerosmith, Rocks
Jars of Clay, If I Left the Zoo
* the Kinks, Something Else by the Kinks
Shania Twain, Come On Over
Eluveitie, Evocation I: The Arcane Dominion

Have I ever mentioned that I hate ranking and scoring things? Now you get to enjoy hating me ranking things too! It’s a group activity now! Anyway, the review. 

1/23 Max Richter’s 2015 Sleep

Contemporary classical composer Max Richter is known for his ambient, expressive works. My personal favorite of his is Recomposed by Max Richter: Vivaldi — The Four Seasons, which is, as it says, a recomposition of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. He’s taken much of the original structure of the piece out, nicking a melody or motif here and there, to build something that sounds at once like it’s own thing, and recognizably like Vivaldi. 

A couple years ago, El and I ran into a piece from Recomposed on a playlist, did the full kombucha girl meme with it, and followed Richter back to discover an eight hour twenty four minute long composition titled, intriguingly, Sleep. Again, this is titled to do what it says: Sleep is a record you’re intended to sleep through.

On the surface, this doesn’t seem that strange; there are any number of rainy mood and soothing melody albums and playlists out there, or apps you can download to generate the shifting white noise of your literal dreams. People love sleeping to sounds. Our world is loud. Partners snore, cats prowl, cars race by, the heater is grumbling, and all through it there’s something buzzing from somewhere across the room. And that’s just what comes from outside, before you add in the schedule for tomorrow, the impending wave of fascism that is coming for your family, whatever piece of work you’ve not quite put down for the day, and the full episode of Boy Meets World where Cory has an emotional affair with the girl at the ski resort all playing full volume inside your skull.  

Hm. My universalism may have gotten away from me there. Anyway, our world is loud. Having music playing while we sleep can offer a way to control for that, and something to focus on instead of Topanga’s broken heart. Max Richter’s Sleep is, at least, more deliberate than that. It is 31 tracks with titles from everything like “Dream 1 (before the wind blows it all away),” or “never fade into nothingness,” to “Aria 2,” and “Space 17 (chains),” and lengths ranging from under three to over thirty minutes long. (There are not 16 other Spaces, however there is another Aria; it’s even numbered 1!) 

Just like the songs titles seem mixed, cut, and whimsically rearranged, so to does the music. There are a handful of musical ideas—dreams, if you will—that Richter will roll around over the course of the night. Rather than distinct movements or songs, it shifts and flexes through its fragments of dream with its string ensemble, its nonverbal soprano vocal, and its piano all occasionally remembering bits of their earlier dreams and looking at them again. The result is, frankly, a bit disorienting, and at times properly creepy. I certainly wouldn’t call it particularly soothing; it’s got a dark shifting mood that runs through and regularly reasserts itself, and is not afraid of a nice middle of the night crescendo.

Max Richter, who reports that he has always slept very well, says Sleep is “protest music against this sort of very industrialized, intense, mechanized way of living right now…It’s a call to arms to stop what we’re doing.” I, meanwhile, have literally never slept well in my life, so when we ran into Richter’s work I was intrigued by it. We listened to it one night, then another, and before too long it just became the last step before going to bed. At first it was a little difficult to sleep through, but at some point in the last couple years it just became what being asleep sounds like. When I wake up in the middle of the night with the sound of my wife’s scream echoing in my mind it’s as comforting a companion as the cat on my hip or my actually not-a-dream wife behind me, telling me quickly that I am in bed, I am awake, and, crucially, as anyone with chronic insomnia will tell you, whether or not I can let myself drift back to sleep without having to look at my mortal enemy: the clock. 

Richter has done a couple of live performances of this piece with little beds for the audience rather than seats. I’ve thought about that fact a lot as I’ve been laying in my bed listening to it. I imagined it as a darkened stage in an emptied concert hall filled with tidy rows of mattresses. I’d think about whether there were shift breaks for the musicians, or if I’d have been remotely able to sleep in such an open space.

He’s done more shows since, and some do look more like what I imagined, but the first one was done as a live broadcast for BBC Radio 3. There’s a ragged sense of disarray to the photographs of that concert space, with bare frame cots and royal blue sleeping bags tucked into various corners of the room. What I never imagined, though, were the onesies. Apparently, animal onesies became “a bit of a thing” at the overnight shows, a detail that Richter relates with a delighted giggle. “I think it’s hilarious, and why not?” he asks. It’s important for people to feel they are comfortable—he wants them to fall asleep, after all. His favorite part of the performance is getting “to see the audience gradually drifting off and settling down, until we get to a point where it feels like, rather than us performing a piece of music to an audience, we’re rather accompanying something that’s happening.”

(In another interview about live shows, he mentions onesies again, relating the story of a man in a tiger onesie who just stood motionless in front of the stage for three hours; he’s said that this record is about removing the expectations surrounding classical music, and I suppose that includes his own.)

He also talks about collaborating on the album with neuroscientist, David Eagleman, about the functions of the brain during sleep, although he doesn’t discuss how he translated that information into music in any detail. I’d put better than even odds on it being a bit of science-flavored nonsense, but it was clearly a thing that mattered to Richter. “Sleeping,” as he put it, “is one of the most important things we do,” and Sleep is exploring the idea of the unconscious mind as “a place for music to live.” He wanted to make music that was “an inquiry into how the sleeping mind can encounter a music performance,” describing the liminal space of consciousness around sleep and asking “what happens to music here” and whether it can “function as a truly shared creative space.” Which… that’s not science, buddy. That’s magic. You’re doing magic. 

Because, here’s the thing: I can’t speak to neuroscience or its understanding of the use of the collective unconscious to affect change in the world, but I sure as hell can to magic, and it has some pretty clear feelings about that very thing. The concept of a magical ritual is all wrapped up in these ideas; the very significance of a thing is strengthened with intentional use. You don’t need a secret society and the nine holy names of god, or even an Enya record and a quartz crystal. Magic is just convincing the world that you have a better story to tell than the other guy; there are loads of ways to do that.

Some time in 2023,  after El and I had been sleeping with Richter’s Sleep regularly for a while, I realized that the hard drop when the album ended was unpleasant to wake up to, and asked El to try putting some music on to play for me in the morning when she got up. She would, it turns out, and took to it with the zeal that she takes to all of her creative pursuits, going out of her way to pick new and interesting things for me to wake up to every day. See, I’d mentioned, at some point, a desire to get a better sense of music at large, having gotten increasingly annoyed at what I’d termed my ‘Noun Hole,’ the cheeky description of how my unmanaged ADHD paired with the isolation my parents kept me in meant that nouns just… went into a hole, Wile E. Coyote style never to be seen again.

Her curation was one of the most thoughtful gifts I’d ever been given, and it was just happening around me. I needed some way to hold it, and to offer her a gift in return. But more than that… I just had this itch. That was the summer I did the Sága vé for the first time, and she wanted me to write. And it turned out what I wanted to write was criticism. I remember the first time we went to Thought Bubble, and I was surprised to find myself spending most of my time chatting with critics and writers instead of other artists. There was this “ah yes, one of us” vibe, in both directions. It had been chewing at my mind—I knew that feeling could have implications if I wanted it to. So I took to Bluesky. The stakes were so low I couldn’t even trip over them, and it gave me somewhere to start. Phase One, as it ended up being, formatted as little capsule reviews that ended with a letter grade. 

It was a mostly delightful affair, although I admit that deciding that I was allowed to take up even that space was quite a large battle for me. I called my noise project the King of the HideBehinds, you know? Standing out in front yelling about how the Beatles’ “Yesterday”  is mid doesn’t seem very HideBehind. But it turns out a thing you can hide behind is an authorial voice. And a year ago, when mine began to strain against the confines of the skeet format, this column was born.

I don’t actually know when I stopped saying, “I want to learn to write criticism” and moved to “I am a critic,” or for that matter, when “I’m a critic” became my preferred answer to “what do you do?” instead of “I’m a comics artist.” Those changes snuck up on me somewhere in this past year. I know how it happened, though. 

Like I said earlier, magic is just the work of convincing the world that you have the best story to tell. Most magical practice, on a daily level, involves an amount of ritual, which I’ll define as the confluence of repetition, intention, and poetry or meaning. The literal easiest way to make yourself a magical artifact is to use it, intentionally, and with style. My column was nice. It was satisfying, and it was good work. But it wasn’t magic. Not yet.

That happened at the halfway mark. I’d been feeling burnt out on the project, and desperately wanted it to be done. These reviews, the way I wanted to do them, were a significant amount of work. My standards inevitably rose as I learned what I was doing, and how I wanted to do it, and each review became  a whole new puzzle to solve. It’s not just “oh, do you like this,” because that’s boring. I barely care if I like a record;  how the hell do I expect you to care? No, the trick for a review is in finding what’s interesting to say about the record. For 366 days in a row Sleep would end, my puzzle for the day would drop into my lap and I would get to work . Whether I was sick, or traveling, or my support systems were shaking and falling around me, every morning, Sleep would end, and I had a whole new story to find.

I wanted to push this daily grind off and go write any of the myriad of other things that I was suddenly a good enough writer to dream up. Whole essays got conjured, drafted, and outgrown before I had a chance to start them. None of which is to say I resented the work; it has been my absolute heart and pleasure for a year. I was doing this, and it was working… but it could work better. So I changed the format again. 

One thing the evolution of that format from Bluesky capsule review (my Christgau era) to weekly Patreon posts (the Pitchfork era, with a numerical score from 0-10 and that obnoxious significant digit) did was force me to look at the structure of the “review” as a concept. At some point the project, for me, became less about what I was reviewing than about how I was reviewing it. If I noticed that I was doing too many personal narratives, I’d drop the first person all together for a while. Maybe I’d describe the music synesthetically, or I’d do it as a little biography of someone on the record. There are a lot of ways to write about something, and I wanted to study the form itself. 

Also, I just absolutely hated scoring things. It’s bloody awful. It didn’t help that mine, unlike Pitchfork’s, came at the end of the review, so they always got the last word. Sometimes that could be funny, or useful, but more often it was a structural lodestone crashing into the end of my review like the Kool-Aid man; “Oh Yeah! 7.4!” I fucking hated that number. 

But the format change itself was interesting, and about more than getting away from scoring—although that was decidedly a motivator. It was during a car ride with El where I was mulling these things over, and looking back I realize that’s when this column properly became a work of magic. There’s something undeniably powerful about staring back at six months of work, already feeling burnt out and ready to move on, and deciding that no, actually, I’m not done, I’m going to do all that again. 

Of course, I wasn’t just going back the way I came—another six months of the project just to prove I could. It needed to transform again if it was going to serve my needs. It was time to define my own style. And so  “perfect for:” was born. Where the score had felt like a lodestone, “perfect for” let me have the last word on the review on my own terms. It looks like a subtle change, but tonally it was seismic, and it let me do all sorts of new things with the review structure. Put the whole review in the perfect for? Check. Angry rant? Check. Blend it into a sentence? Check. I used it to make a dismissive review actually deal with the body of the record and to dismiss a record I’d thoroughly reviewed. It was a lot harder than a number, but it was my voice.

And with that decision, my review column became a magical ritual to turn myself into a critic.

Yes, if you do a thing enough you’re likely to get better at it. Do something, and you’ve become the person who did it. I don’t mean that the magic made me a better writer: I did that work. I’m still doing that work. That work was even necessary to the magic working. But what I mean is that it changed how I think about myself, how I feel, and how I move through the world. I mean that it has fundamentally altered the way I hear music, and the way I view art and the world in general. This has been a massively transformative work—as foundational a reworking of self as deciding to transition. This has been magic.

Besides, I had all the elements I needed: repetition and ritual, in the form of the daily grind and the dedication to doing the work; intention in the form of making it my own, giving the project itself structure and shape, and in my use of the reviews to look at the concept of “a review” from various angles; and poetry in the form of my deepening relationship with the goddess of language to whom I’d dedicated the work of becoming a writer, of having at the exact 6 month mark molded it into a year-long project, and of Max Richter’s Sleep, which was after all designed to make people slow down, and change their relationship to art and music.

Perfect for: And it did.