For his 2015 conceptual album Sleep, composer Max Richter offered listeners an eight-hour lullaby. Now for the latest episode of Composed Of, London-based director Edward Paginton captures Richter in an unprecedented reflection on the project and his work. Here, Paginton talks about the film:

“I wanted to respond to Max Richter’s Sleep. I was struck by the fragile physicality music has on the ‘self’, and its ability to transport you to unconscious environments.

“Richter created a composition that is not a concert hall piece but a musical proposition: how can you recreate the immaterial effects of sleep through sound? For me, music can be quite a violent manipulation on your visual imagination—forging landscapes, affecting your sense of placement, influencing the way you might perceive the world through sense and emotion alone.

“In the film, I wanted to capture this essential ‘unknowability’ of the world—familiar pasts, surprises of the present, undecided futures. Sleep as a medium has the ability to traverse time. For me, this is hopeful. In uncertain times, what is more indeterminate than hope itself? Sleep, perhaps.”