As one of Britain's leading contemporary composers, Max Richter has written what's thought to be the longest single piece of music ever to be recorded, at eight hours long and intended to send the listener to sleep.
"It's an eight-hour lullaby" says Richter of the piece, scored for piano, strings, electronics and vocals - but no words.
"It's my personal lullaby for a frenetic world. A manifesto for a slower pace of existence."
'SLEEP' is to receive its world premiere later this year in Berlin, in a concert performance set to last from 12 midnight to 8am where attendees will be given beds instead of seats.
The eight-hour version of the album will also be available for download as a digital album, and for those who prefer it a one-hour adaptation of the work released on CD, vinyl, download and streaming formats through Deutsche Grammophon on September 4.
"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.
Recently enjoying praise at the Royal Opera House in London for Wayne McGregor's ballet Woolf Works which he scored, he has in the past composed and released five solo albums as well as recomposing Vivaldi's 'Four Seasons' for one of 2012's best-selling records.
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."
Worldwide special overnight 'SLEEP' concerts are to be announced in the coming weeks and months.