MARIE SUTTER

 This video, brought to life by Marie Sutter, who created, edited, and produced it, captures the essence of Richter – co-founder of Studio Richter Mahr, alongside his partner, the visionary visual artist Yulia Mahr. Nestled in the heart of Oxfordshire’s rolling countryside, Max and Yulia transformed a former farmhouse into a cutting-edge multimedia production studio, powered sustainably by solar energy and heat-pump technology. Encompassed by 31 acres of lush woodland, the duo’s devotion to both the land and the creative process intertwines, crafting a sanctuary where the boundaries of nature and artistry blur, offering a space for emerging and established creatives alike to nurture and elevate their work.

Marie Sutter created this video in an artistic way for the music video of Sleep. For this new EP, SLEEP: Piano Edition, Max Richter has focused on his own instrument and reimagined three extended tracks for solo piano.

For Richter, the piano is a sketch pad – the starting point for new creative ventures, enabling subconscious ideas to float up to the surface as he begins composing. As he notes, the instrument also plays a key role in SLEEP: “One of the two main themes is very slow-moving, pulsed piano music – the instrument is one of the main characters in the piece.” It was therefore a natural choice to return to the keyboard and strip certain sections of the larger work down to their basic structures.

SLEEP: Piano Edition has the same spacious and immersive qualities as its epic parent work. Whether we listen to one track or the seamless flow of all three, the slow, steady rhythms, repetitions, and subtle transformations offer a sense of familiarity and security.

“SLEEP is a piece about finding a place to pause, a place to rest,” concludes the composer. “Because even though the world is very exciting, it’s also now very exhausting, especially psychologically, with the advent of 24-hour news, social media, the internet completely saturating our lives. We’re beset by ecological, social, political troubles. Obviously, the best way we can deal with these is to have a clear mind. In order to do that, we need to find ways to kind of settle our minds down. And SLEEP offers one such opportunity.”