‘Trust in me, just in me, shut your eyes and trust in me.’ But if I may segue from The Jungle Book’s python to Blue Velvet, then I would say Max Richter is the candy-coloured clown they call the sandman (as swooned over by Dennis Hopper’s heid-the-ba’ character in David Lynch’s classic flick), tip-toeing into your room every night just to sprinkle stardust and to whisper ‘go to sleep, everything is alright.’

A decade on from Sleep, his eight-and-a-half-hour study of where sleep and sound meet, Richter has made a sequel. Sleep is the most-streamed classical album of all time (2.2 billion and counting, crows the press release); time in this case beginning in the 90s/00s rather than with the Big Bang or formation of the earth’s crust. 

Sleep Circle takes the woozy and circular motifs from Sleep and works them into a 90-minute accompaniment for deep sleep. It’s music to sleep (to), per chance to dream (aye, there’s the rub; soporific’s not a quality we tend to value in art) or maybe to watch a match on telly with the commentary muted while eating banana chips. I favour the former but have also listened while drinking tea and watching the smoke drift over Leith from the Arthur’s Seat wildfire, reading a book review in The Spectator (who have described Richter as Deutsche Grammophon’s ‘in-house snooze-meister’, which I believe to be a compliment) and doing my physio exercises for a minor running injury (just another week to go, thanks for asking).

Richter, German-born and raised in Bedford, regards Auld Reekie as home, having studied composition at the University Of Edinburgh in the 80s and lived here when his kids were younger. But he seems to spend more time at his studio in Oxfordshire these days (go watch the Mighty Yellows, Max; they’ll blow your post-classical minimalist socks off). He’s a serial collaborator, having worked with, among others: Future Sound Of London, Vashti Bunyan, Roni Size, Tilda Swinton, Martin Scorsese, Wayne McGregor, Charlie Brooker, Robert Wyatt and Dior.

Comfortable with all aspects of culture, including pop and the high end, he declares a love of Bach and The Beatles, Kraftwerk and Chic, Virginia Woolf and Franz Kafka, King Tubby and Studio Ghibli, Murakami and Eurovision. In his teens, his milkman took to delivering albums by John Cage, Philip Glass and Steve Reich. Now, I’ve checked the McQueens’ Dairies website and while they can provide eggs and orange juice to supplement my regular milk delivery on a Monday and Thursday, they don’t cater for the work of avant-garde titans of the 1960s New York scene. Shame.

But being an ingenue to the world of classical music, buying records on the Deutsche Grammophon label if they have a nice cover and usually from finds in charity shops, I tend to bracket Richter with Brian Eno, Ryuichi Sakamoto and Godspeed You! Black Emperor. You could call it ambient or ambient baroque or a ‘parallel venture to classical music’ (in his own words) but Erik Satie might have referred to it as furniture music: ‘melodious, softening the noises of the knives and forks at dinner.’ Indeed, early on in his career, his mentor Luciano Berio asked: ‘Why all these notes, Max?’

And when Richter played Sleep at the Great Wall Of China, he went for a coffee two hours into the epic set, only to discover the armed guards of the People’s Liberation Army curled up asleep. Doubtless a case of Chinese whispers and too much stardust. That and military fatigue.

Max Richter: Sleep Circle is released by Deutsche Grammophon on Friday 5 September; main picture: Rory Van Millingen.