Max Richter – (From) Sleep

“Somehow, in Europe, over the last century, as complexity and inaccessibility 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.”

Long-form compositions are a challenge to a composer, because he (she) has to deal with the audience’s relatively short attention span: not many people will be able to focus and keep their concentration for 4 hours or even more. For this reason, it is no surprise that long-form experiments are often found in the realm of ambient music. Ánd that they are often dealing with ‘sleep’ – which instantly solves the attention span problem too.

Kenneth Kirschner – Compressions & Rarefactions

It was Brian Eno who once described ambient music as ‘music that is as ignorable as it is interesting’ – but it may very well be Kenneth Kirschner taking this concept to the extreme.

“Time, space, repetition, pattern, the very very big and the very very small. There’s an effort to be a part of the continuum and to recognize it, to try to remove the self if possible in a recognition of the bigger things. Also, neither of us is afraid of the dark.”