Dec 22, 2019

Sundaze 1951

Hello,  more soundtracks by Max.......


Today's artist is is a German-born British composer who has been an influential voice in post-minimalist composition and in the meeting of contemporary classical and alternative popular musical styles since the early 2000s. Richter is classically trained, having graduated in composition from the Royal Academy of Music and studied with Luciano Berio in Italy.Richter also composes music for stage, opera, ballet and screen. He has also collaborated with other musicians, as well as with performance, installation and media artists. He has recorded eight solo albums and his music is widely used in cinema.  .......N-Joy

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Combining the discipline of his classical background with the inventive spirit of electronic music, Max Richter's work as a producer and composer speaks to -- and frequently critiques -- 21st century life in eloquent and evocative ways. On early masterworks such as 2002's Memoryhouse and 2003's The Blue Notebooks, he united his childhood memories and commentary on war's devastating aftermath into gorgeous, aching music; with 2015's eight-hour Sleep, he challenged the increasing disposability of art and music as well as audiences' ever-decreasing attention spans. Richter's fascination with the growing role of technology in everyday life was a major theme of releases spanning 2008's collection of bespoke ringtones to the music for a particularly paranoid 2016 episode of the TV series Black Mirror. Despite the high-concept nature of much of his work, Richter always maintains a powerful emotional connection with his listeners; 2012's Recomposed: The Four Seasons, an experimental reimagining of Vivaldi's violin concertos, topped classical charts in over 20 countries. The emotive quality of his music translated perfectly to scoring and soundtrack work, which ranged from documentaries such as Waltz with Bashir (2008); feature films including Mary Queen of Scots (2018); television series like Taboo (2017); and stage productions including Infra (2008) and Woolf Works (2015), both projects with Richter's longtime collaborator, choreographer Wayne McGregor. Richter's mix of modern composition, electronic music, and field recordings was as influential as it was innovative, and paved the way for like-minded artists such as Nico Muhly and Jóhann Jóhannsson.

Born in West Germany in the mid-'60s, Richter and his family moved to the U.K. when he was still a little boy, settling in the country town of Bedford. By his early teens, he was listening to the canon of classical music as well as modern composers including Philip Glass, whose music was a major influence on Richter. The Clash, the Beatles, and Pink Floyd were also important, along with the early electronic music scene; inspired by artists such as Kraftwerk, Richter built his own analog instruments. He studied composition and piano at Edinburgh University, the Royal Academy of Music, and in Florence with Luciano Berio. He then became a founding member of the Piano Circus, a contemporary classical group that played works by Glass, Brian Eno, Steve Reich, Arvo Pärt, and Julia Wolfe, and also incorporated found sounds and video into their performances. After ten years and five albums for Decca/Argo, Richter left the group and became more involved in the U.K.'s thriving electronic music scene, collaborating with the Future Sound of London on 1996's Dead Cities (which features a track named after him) and The Isness; he also contributed orchestrations to Roni Size's 2000 album In the Mode.

Richter's own work evolved from the Xenakis-inspired music of his early days into something that included his electronic and pop influences. His 2002 debut album, Memoryhouse, introduced his mix of modern composition, electronica, and field recordings. Recorded with the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra, the album explored childhood memories as well as the aftermath of the Kosovo War in the 1990s and was hailed as a masterpiece. Two years later, Richter made his FatCat debut with The Blue Notebooks, which incorporated readings from Franz Kafka's Blue Octavo Notebooks and Polish writer Czesław Miłosz by actress Tilda Swinton into dreamlike pieces for strings and piano that touched on the Iraq War and Richter's early years. Released in 2006, Songs from Before paired his plaintive sound with texts written by Haruki Murakami and delivered by Robert Wyatt. In 2008, he issued 24 Postcards in Full Colour, a collection of intricate ringtones envisioned by Richter as a way to connect people around the world. That year also saw the release of his music for Ari Folman's Golden Globe-winning film Waltz with Bashir. Focusing on electronics instead of a typical orchestral score, it was Richter's highest-profile soundtrack project to date. He then worked on several other film scores, including music for Benedek Fliegauf's Womb, Alex Gibney's My Trip to Al-Qaeda, and David MacKenzie's Perfect Sense. Another scoring project, Infra, marked the beginning of Richter's enduring collaboration with choreographer Wayne McGregor. Commissioned by the Royal Ballet in 2008, Infra was a ballet inspired by by T.S. Eliot's classic poem "The Wasteland," and the the 2005 London terrorist bombings. Richter re-recorded and expanded his music for the 2010 album Infra, his fourth release for FatCat Records.


Richter began the 2010s with soundtrack work that included the award-winning scores to Die Fremde (2010) and Lore (2012). The composer reunited with McGregor for 2012's Sum, a chamber opera based on Sum: Forty Tales of the Afterlives, a collection of short stories by neuroscientist David Eagleman about the possibility of life after death. That year also saw the release of one of Richter's most popular albums, Recomposed by Max Richter: Vivaldi - The Four Seasons. An avant-garde, loop-based reworking of the composer's timeless set of violin concertos, it topped the classical charts in 22 countries, including the U.K., the U.S., and Germany. In turn, McGregor choreographed a ballet, Kairos, to Richter's recomposition. Disconnect, the score to Henry-Alex Rubin's film about the impact of technology on relationships, arrived in 2013. His other releases that year included the score to Wadjda, which was the first feature-length film made by a Saudi Arabian woman (director Haifaa Al-Mansour); the music to Ritesh Batra's The Lunchbox and Ruairí Robinson's sci-fi excursion The Last Days on Mars. Richter also worked with Folman again on the music to The Congress, an adaptation of Stanislaw Lem's novel The Futurological Congress.


In 2014, Richter launched a mentorship program for aspiring young composers and wrote music for HBO's The Leftovers, which also featured pieces from Memoryhouse and The Blue Notebooks. The following year saw the arrival of Sleep, an eight-hour ambient piece scored for piano, strings, electronics, and vocals that Richter described as a "lullaby for a frenetic world and a manifesto for a slower pace of existence." The piece premiered at a Berlin performance where the audience was given beds instead of seats. Sleep and From Sleep, a one-hour adaptation, were released in September 2015. The following year, Richter provided the score to the sci-fi/horror film Morgan and the disturbingly cheery music for "Nosedive," an episode of Black Mirror that took the all-consuming nature of social media to extremes. Released in January 2017, Three Worlds: Music from Woolf Works drew from his score for McGregor's 2015 Royal Ballet production inspired by three of Virginia Woolf's most acclaimed novels. It was followed that May by the soundtrack compilation Out of the Dark Room. That September, Richter's Emmy-nominated music for the BBC One drama Taboo was released.


Richter remained busy on soundtrack work in 2018, with projects including the music for the HBO TV series My Brilliant Friend as well as the scores to films like Hostiles, White Boy Rick, and Mary Queen of Scots, which won a Best Original Score -- Feature Film Award at the Hollywood Music in Media Awards. In October 2019, Deutsche Grammophon issued Voyager: Essential Max Richter, an expansive retrospective that included two previously unreleased pieces written for Sleep.


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Susan (Eva Green, Cracks, Casino Royale) is a scientist whose research has caused her to neglect virtually everything else in her life, including love. That is until she meets Michael (Ewan McGregor, The Ghost Writer, Angels & Demons), a talented chef, and suddenly everything starts to change not just in Susan s life, but in the entire world. While Susan and Michael are experiencing new and unforeseen depths of feeling, all around the globe a new epidemic is causing people to lose their sensory perceptions. Are Susan and Michael s increasingly intense feelings for each other in spite of the epidemic, or because of it? A life-affirming look at what it means to love and be loved in turbulent times, director David Mackenzie s PERFECT SENSE is equal parts touching romance and chilling thriller.  The film premiered at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival. Max pushed the movie to another level here by this beautiful work Upon re-watching Perfect Sense it became clear that the music was a big part of what made the movie so powerful. Outstanding tracks Sorrow Atoms and Luminous.



Max Richter - Perfect Sense (O.S.T.) (flac 225mb)

01 On A Turning World 2:40
02 Faint Pulse 0:49
03 Sorrow Atoms 3:14
04 Frequencies, Detectors 0:50
05 Tenderly The Light 1:46
06 Monologue 1:33
07 The Dark Abysm Of Time 1:19
08 Love Song (Cascade) 1:03
09 Overlooked 2:10
10 Retinal 2:44
11 Fictions And Data 2:05
12 A Place We Were 1:09
13 Something Under Her Skin 3:02
14 All Around Us 2:44
15 A Lovers Complaint 3:35
16 Overload 2:33
17 Things Left Behind 3:22
18 Love Song (Nocturnal) 1:51
19 Eternal Flowers Question Stars 2:26
20 Requeim 1:46
21 Luminous 5:06

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One of the most beautiful and definitive tracks in Max Richter's ever-growing body of work is "On the Nature of Daylight" from The Blue Notebooks, the album that brought him to the attention of many critics and fans. Since that breakthrough, he's developed a niche as a composer ready and willing to revamp the classics, as he did with Vivaldi's The Four Seasons, as well as a sensitive and versatile composer of scores for films ranging from looks at the not-so-tame secret lives of domesticated animals (Die Fremde) to dystopian sci-fi (Perfect Sense). Richter's music for Disconnect is an intersection of those career paths: the score uses "Daylight" as its emotional and musical focus, surrounding it with pieces that echo and complement it. While Martin Scorsese's brain-twisting thriller Shutter Island also featured the piece prominently, here it's fundamental to the film and its exploration of how technology brings people together and (more often) pulls them apart. Cues like "The Swimmer" reprise "On the Nature of Daylight"'s beautifully somber violin melodies, while "Confrontation" pits them against pummeling electronic beats in a way that could be heavy-handed but maintains a dignified poignancy in Richter's hands. Elsewhere, the score borrows from other Blue Notebooks pieces like the lovely "Written on the Sky," or evokes them as on the mournful organ pieces "Hospital" and "The Gun." Given the film's tech fixation, most of the rest of Disconnect's music is more electronic and makes the most of Richter's minimalism, whether on brief, wash-like tracks such as "The Report" or more elaborate ones like "Zero Balance," which moves from delicate tones to more ominous ones as it progresses. Many of these tracks aren't as attention-getting as the ones that draw from Richter's classical roots, but his cues for Disconnect's action scenes are as tense as they are restrained; "Pursuit" and "Running" are just as taut, but far subtler, than a typical climactic score piece. Disconnect is of a piece with scores like Cliff Martinez's Traffic, where the music seems to just faintly tint the air with the proper mood. It may not be among Richter's richest works, but he provides what the film needs from its music with more depth and restraint than many other composers could have managed.



Max Richter - Disconnect (O.S.T.) (flac 232mb)

01 On the Nature of Daylight 6:14
02 Find Schumaker 0:47
03 Love Slave 2:49
04 Zero Balance 4:00
05 Clone the Hard Drive 1:20
06 Pursuit 1:35
07 Hospital 1:41
08 Running 7:04
09 The Report 0:58
10 Written on the Sky 1:38
11 Arrival 2:10
12 Drycleaner 1:46
13 Break In 3:29
14 Confrontation 11:01
15 Afghanistan 1:33
16 I Will Come and Get You 2:05
17 The Gun 2:07
18 Derek to El Paso 1:39
19 Unwritten 1:49
20 The Swimmer 2:07
21 Ni su nave (Bonus Track) 2:57


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Great score. Came up on a Pandora playlist a few times before I had even heard of the movie (which is a trip-fest, by the way). Never knew Robin Wright was a singer, but she nails the two songs she does on this. Drops a star for a few of the higher tempo songs, but if I was being honest, that's mostly because they remind me that I was pretty confused by what the hell was happening in the movie!
Heartachingly beautiful music and Robin Wright continues to surprise and delight with her talents. Fair warning though, a few of the pieces will bring tears to your eyes because they are just such pure aural bliss.



Max Richter - Le Congrès (O.S.T.)   (flac 246mb)

1 Beginning and Ending 4:54
Piano Trio No. 2 in E flat major
2 Andante con Moto from Trio in E-flat major, D.929 4:17
3 Winterreise 2:09
4 On the Road to Abrahama 1 4:14
5 In Her Reflection 1:18
6 On the Road to Abrahama 2 1:15
7 All Your Joys, All Your Pain 4:52
8 In the Cosmic Lobby 2:19
9 Out of the Dark 5:03
10 The Rebel Attack 3:14
11 Still Dreaming, Still Travelling 1:30
12 Forever Young 4:03

Nocturnes
13 Nocturne Op. 27, No. 1 in C# minor 1:15
14 In the Garden of Cosmic Speculation 3:55
15 Badass Agent Robin 1:03
16 She Finds the Child 3:39
17 If it Be Your Will 4:10

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The first 6 tracks from the score do a great job of creating this musical atmosphere of space. "Stormy Weather", track 1, introduces a theme that you'll hear throughout various points in the score. It's very ominous but also captures a sense of vastness. High pitched strings slowly moving back and forth over two notes repeatedly are joined like an echo by the low brass. You can't help but to imagine that you are looking over the strange landscape of the planet mars. The second track continues this same theme but adds twinkling flutes and violins to give you that classic "space" feel in the score. These opening three tracks are somewhat minimalistic but yet very effective in setting up this atmosphere for the story. Richter does an exceptionable job at being able to maintain this "space vibe" while tangling it with the feeling that something bad is going to happen. The composer begins to add tension building electronic pulse rhythms in "Final Briefing" (track 6) and occasionally toys around with other such sounds in the following tracks. The composer manages to fit everything together without losing sight of the already established tone of the score. The increasing "strangeness" of the instrumentation only heightens the effect of things growing more and more out of control within the story. "Dalby and Marko" (track 8) is a great example of this development within the music. It's a rather long piece running nearly 9 minutes but it gives plenty of time to evolve the music into new areas and becomes almost like a new chapter in the events to come. "They are still moving" (track 10), has a static fluttering effect that conveys the sense of movement and Richter continues to throw in other unique sounds throughout the following tracks that gives you the sense that events are spiraling out of control and getting more horrible by the minute. The composer also manages to find moments to sneak in some of the earlier themes in this escalating horror and I appreciate the reminders.

There are times when the score dips down into some excessively long sequences of almost silent ambience however. Cues like "Runaway" (track 17) are slow to develop and become less interesting until they are nearly over. Fortunately, we are rewarded with great tracks like "Ascent" (track 22) that is a very climatic piece that gradually "ascends" into a growing and powerful piece that suddenly and somewhat unexpectedly stops. The final track, "Its Full of Stars", is a more robust version of the theme that was introduced in the first track. It's a great sounding piece that becomes a great way to close the score.



Max Richter - The Last Days On Mars (O.S.T.) ( flac   282mb)

01 Stormy Weather 1:33
02 Aurora Mars Mission 2 1:06
03 Lost in Space 3:11
04 Airlock 1:12
05 Secret Plan 1:26
06 Final Briefing 1:15
07 After the Collapse 0:49
08 Dalby and Marko 8:50
09 The Return of Dalby and Marko 4:43
10 They Are Still Moving 2:36
11 Escape 0:30
12 The Plan 2:10
13 The Tunnel 4:09
14 Return to Base 5:31
15 We Got an Emergency Down Here 4:01
16 There Is No Escaping Out of Here 2:58
17 Runaway 4:01
18 Do You Think They Still Feel? 1:31
19 Please Respond 1:01
20 Lane 2:57
21 Do Not Open the Doors 2:20
22 Ascent 2:54
23 Its Full of Stars 5:34

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Testament Of Youth is a British drama telling the true story of Vera Brittan who served as a voluntary aid detachment nurse in London, Malta and France during World War I who later became a writer and a pacifist. It is based on the First World War memoir of the same name written by Vera Brittain. It’s directed by James Kent and the music is composed by Max Richter, whowrote a beautiful and engaging score to the film.
‘No More Fear’ somewhat puts me at ease. Fear no more. This is very nice. It’s a minimalistic cue with only a guitar like instrument and a solo violin underneath. Simple and nice. Pretty good start to hopefully another great score. ‘Prelude’ ups the tempo a little bit with a nice harp motif at the start. A lovely complementary violin adds so much to this cue. From 1:27 it takes off with some piano. This is the first goose bump moment of the score. Love it! ‘Love And Imagination’ is yet another winner in my book. It’s so simple, yet so beautiful. The first part of the score has been really good, mostly a bit dark, but good. There’s been quite a few highlights, in fact most of the cues are highlights of this great score. ‘Realities’ despite it’s name is quite uplifting, not unlike ‘The Rising Of The Sun’. It seems like it could take a positive turn musically now with ‘A Duet For Three’ which feels like a dance, a classical dance. It’s lightweight and quite catchy. I like it. More dance with ‘These I Send To You’, but a more slower experience. Max Richter is awesome, he is the composer who says the most with the least amount of music these days. This is another minimalistic score that appeals. There’s just no need to be very complex to get access to emotions. All you need it to hit that right note, the right motif and Richter has done it again. .



Max Richter - Testament of Youth (O.S.T.)   (flac   177mb)

01 No More Fear 1:05
02 Prelude 1:54
03 Love and Imagination 2:42
04 Pools of Gold 1:42
05 Never Did Run Smooth 1:40
06 The Triumph of Time 1:27
07 Each Others Minds 1:59
08 The Rising of the Sun 2:37
09 Anathemata 1:38
10 Departed 1:27
11 Action at a Distance 1:07
12 Realities 1:08
13 A Duet for Three 1:41
14 These I Send to You 2:33
15 Before the Ending of the Day 1:18
16 The Chambers of the Heart 0:56
17 Vergissmeinnicht 5:11
18 Mantegna / Entropy 0:55
19 Returning Over the Nightmare Ground 2:53
20 Et in Terra Pax 2:03
21 I Will Not Forget You 3:55

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4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Le Congres - Thanks for posting.

Anonymous said...

Yule Blessings to you

Anonymous said...

What's new pussycat?

Anonymous said...

Rho - Xs is a marvel! Many many thanks for all the new worlds.