In a career that spans almost three decades, the classically trained British composer Max Richter has been part of a minimalist piano collective; he’s worked with the British electronic group The Future Sound of London and Mercury Prize winner Roni Size; he’s composed ambient and contemporary classical pieces that incorporate field recordings, archived sound, Tilda Swinton reading Kafka and Czeslaw Milosz and Robert Wyatt reading Murakami; he’s scored ballets and films and plays and operas and television shows and released an album of 24 short compositions meant to be used as ringtones; he’s recomposed Vivaldi’s Four Seasons.

It’s the sort of focused creative frenzy that might explain his recent epic, Sleep—an eight-plus-hour ambient work, consisting mainly of soothing strings, honey-toned piano, and a warm and resonant electronic bass effect, meant to accompany somnolence. Richter premiered the work, which he describes as “an eight-hour personal lullaby for a frenetic world and a manifesto for a slower pace of existence,” in Berlin for a pajama-clad audience of 400, which drifted off to sleep in the beds moved into a performance space for the occasion.

Ambient work, to be sure, can gently tread that fine, quiet space between soothing, calming, peaceful, and just plain boring. Also, to be sure, Sleep is far more than simply 31 interlocked tracks of New Age Muzak: Richter consulted with a neuroscientist specializing in sleep before he composed it, and created Sleep not only to rise and fall in energy to reflect the various stages of actual sleep but to foster them. Of particular note: the deep, almost ethereal bass tones meant to promote slow-wave sleep, a phase that’s responsible for consolidating memory and learning as brain waves oscillate at the supremely mellow frequency of 10 hertz.

The album was released on eight CDs in 2015, but only now is the entire work available to stream. It couldn’t seem to have come at a better time, given how much the world seems to be too much with us these days, to steal Wordsworth’s line. “There’s a lot of noise going on,” as Richter told The Quietus recently. “I feel one of the big challenges right now is to filter out the things we want to spend our time with mentally. We have to curate our own information space and that’s quite a big deal to do. Sometimes it’s nice to have a holiday.”