Following the celebrated, eight-hour magnum opus SLEEP – classical music’s most streamed album of all time – artist Max Richter has composed its sequel, SLEEP: Tranquility Base, taking its namesake from the 1969’s moon landing. Partnering with us, together we crafted a fluid lunar landscape for the EP to inhabit – one led by contrast, context and the subversive use of space. 

Culminating in its launch campaign and design, as well as its single release and two remixes, the album’s dreamlike moonscapes artwork, created in collaboration with Dada Projects, depicts a lunar world that blurs the edges between realism and imagination. Through carefully crafted chromatic and textural experimentation, colliding the moon’s geological tones with space-age, astronautical materials, the resulting visual soundscape has an intangible, astronomical quality – capturing the album’s sense of exploration and discovery, as well as its moonage inspiration. 

Sitting on a separate plane to the album’s 3D interpretation of structure and surface is Richter Sans, an elegant and utilitarian bespoke typeface developed for the artist and album. Beginning as a customised version of the typeface ‘Lateral’ by Schick Toikka, the typeface offers not only a perfect insight into the expertise of Richter’s artistry but provides a powerful tension of faculty and form against the visual’s tactile fluidity. Its earnest, unpretentious and unobtrusive design allows both Max’s melodies and the corresponding spectacle to thrive whilst staying true to the artist’s love of post-war modernist aesthetics. 

Shaping an entirely immersive experience, the mix of type and kinetic texture allows the album to create distinct, captivating scenes, harmonising with Max’s music and the EP’s electronic remixes – courtesy of Kelly Lee Owens and Alva Noto. Similarly, the EP’s experimental world is featured alongside the music’s release on his renowned app, the album’s OOH advertising campaign and digital canvases, championed by its unconventional combination of themes, both acoustic and celestial alike.