Hello,
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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Memoryhouse may be Max Richter's debut album, but he had been developing his unique mix of contemporary classical and electronics for years before it was released. He co-founded the Piano Circus ensemble, who commissioned and performed works by Arvo Pärt, Brian Eno, Philip Glass, and Steve Reich (all of whom were influential on Richter's own music), and used live sampling. He also collaborated with Roni Size and Future Sound of London on their groundbreaking 1996 album Dead Cities. Yet Memoryhouse, which is performed by the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra under conductor Rumon Gumba, doesn't feel derivative of any of Richter's previous projects; the album's pieces are rigorously composed but also highly emotive, seamlessly blending into a whole that feels like, well, a memory. Tracks such as "Europe, After the Rain" and "Maria, the Poet" exemplify the album's mix of Glass-style minimalism fused with evocative samples and field recordings, territory Richter covered even more brilliantly on his next album, The Blue Notebooks. The main melody on "Europe, After the Rain" surfaces here and there on Memoryhouse, taking different forms like "Untitled (Figures)"' delicate electronics and "Garden (1973)/Interior"'s drifting harpsichords and spoken word. "Sarajevo" and "The Twins (Prague)" underscore the album's Eastern European leanings, while pieces with short but descriptive song titles like "Landscape with Figure (1922)" and "Arbenita (11 years)" add to the feeling that they could soundtrack diary entries or captions on old photos. More dramatic tracks such as "Last Days" complement the intimacy of "Embers" and "Andras" nicely, and show the scope of Richter's abilities. An homage to Europe and the haunting power of memories, Memoryhouse is a stunning first album that announced Max Richter as a major talent.
. Max Richter - Memoryhouse ( 297mb)
01 Europe, After The Rain 6:13
02 Maria, The Poet (1913)4:47
03 Laika's Journey 1:30
04 The Twins (Prague) 1:58
05 Sarajevo 4:03
06 Andras 2:42
07 Untitled (Figures) 3:27
08 Sketchbook 1:54
09 November 6:21
10 Jan's Notebook 2:41
11 Arbenita (11 Years) 7:04
12 Garden (1973) / Interior 3:24
13 Landscape With Figure (1922) 5:14
14 Fragment 1:26
15 Lines On A Page (One Hundred Violins) 1:22
16 Embers 3:38
17 Last Days 4:18
18 Quartet Fragment (1908) 3:02
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Though his evocative debut album Memoryhouse introduced Max Richter's fusion of classical music, electronica and found-sounds (a style he calls "post-Classical"), it's his follow-up, The Blue Notebooks, that really showcases the style's -- and Richter's -- potential. The album's ten pieces were inspired by Kafka's Blue Octavo Notebooks, and quotes such as "Everyone carries a room about inside them. This fact can even be proved by means of the sense of hearing. If someone walks fast and one pricks up one's ears and listens, say at night, when everything round about is quiet, one hears, for instance, the rattling of a mirror not quite firmly fastened to the wall," which are read by actress Tilda Swinton, define the spare, reflective intimacy of The Blue Notebooks. The album is simpler than Memoryhouse, with a smaller ensemble of musicians playing on it and a shorter running time, but its restraint makes it a more powerful work -- it's so beautiful and fully realized that it doesn't need to be showy. As other reviews have mentioned, Richter tends to be a more traditional-minded composer than influences like Brian Eno, Philip Glass and Steve Reich. However, his sound works so well and seems so natural because he's not trying to be overtly experimental; the album ranges from pieces with little or no electronic elements, such as the piano-driven "Arboretum," to "Old Song," which is based on a busy, chilly beat that sounds like dripping water. Richter's music embraces all of the sounds that had an impact on him, but more important is the emotional impact that The Blue Notebooks has on its listeners; despite its high-concept origins, it's quite an affecting album. The warm-hearted piano melody on "Horizon Variations" and the delicate, somehow reassuring-sounding string piece "On the Nature of Daylight" both sound vaguely familiar, and are all the more haunting for it. Most striking of all is "Shadow Journal," which begins with hypnotic, bubbling electronics, Swinton's crisp voice and a piercingly lovely violin melody and then brings in harp and an electronic bassline so low that it's almost felt more than it is heard. The piece sounds so much like thinking, like turning inward, that the cawing birds at the end of the track bring a jarring end to its reverie. The field recordings that run through The Blue Notebooks heighten the sense of intimacy, and occasionally, eavesdropping. On "Organum," the distant piano and outdoor sounds feel like listening to somebody else listen to the music; meanwhile, the ticking clocks, clacking typewriter and street traffic on the title track help conjure up that room that everyone carries about inside them. The Blue Notebooks is a stunning album, and one that should be heard not just by classical and electronica fans, but anyone who values thoughtful, subtly expressive music.
Max Richter - The Blue Notebooks (flac 172mb)
01 Level Out 8:55
02 Magic Eye (Remix) 10:02
03 Sol (Remix) 7:30
04 Spiritual Ocean 6:49
05 Levitate 11:23
06 Insum (Remix) 8:17
07 H.U.V.A. Network - Rain Geometry (Solar Fields rmx) 7:51
08 Respiratory Rate 7:50
09 The Sight Is White 7:26
10 Third Time (T Version) 8:16
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For his album, Songs From Before, Max Richter works with the same basic formula that served him so well on 2004’s The Blue Notebooks. That is, combining spoken word pieces with elegiac string arrangements, field recordings, and subtle electronics. But whereas The Blue Notebooks‘s pieces were built around Tilda Swinton’s readings of Franz Kafka, Songs From Before uses Robert Wyatt’s readings of various Haruki Murakami texts as embellishment.
Which, on the whole, works remarkably well. Richter’s string arrangements and subtle programming and electronics creates a mood that lethargic, dreamlike, melancholy mood that is perfectly suited to the themes of loss, nostalgia, and alienation that permeate Murakami’s work.
Listening to tracks such as “Song” and “Harmonium”, it’s difficult to not imagine yourself as Toru Okada, the protagonist of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (arguably Murakami’s most famous novel), as he wanders through menacing, forlorn dreamworlds. “Sunlight” is one of the album’s most beautiful tracks, with its keening, swaying violin melodies that do indeed seem bathed in light—albeit the light that emanates from distant memories of childhood, memories that, through the passing of years, have become stained with loss and regret. Wyatt’s readings of such Murakami texts as Sputnik Sweetheart and Norwegian Wood meld quite extraordinarily with Richter’s arrangements. As Wyatt reads “I’d venture into the city with the first gray of dawn and walk the deserted streets, and when the streets started to fill with people, I holed up back indoors to sleep” on “Flowers For Yulia”, Richter slowly builds up the piece, moving from distant, static-laden radio recordings to swelling strings that are both beautiful and portentous. Meanwhile, fragments of voices drift through the static, barely audible but still adding yet another layer of eeriness to the proceedings—the way they might seem to the text’s protagonist as he drifts off to sleep, seeking to avoid human contact even as it hovers around him. In one of the album’s most stirring moments, Wyatt reads a passage from Sputnik Sweetheart about the fragility and fleetingness of all things beautiful. As his worn voice trails off, emphasizing the final, sad words, Richter’s crystalline electronics swirl about in a spectral manner. Their hollow, ringing tones communicate the exact same tone of mono no aware—the sadness and passing of things—that is affecting and stirring in a way that words, no matter how beautiful they might be, simply cannot achieve. While the combination of spoken word and more classical elements might smack of pretense, Richter manages to avoid that entirely. As with The Blue Notebooks, the results here are very affecting. If there’s one complaint, it’s that half of the tracks on Songs From Before clock in around a minute or so (the disc as a whole falls under 40 minutes). As such, many of them feel more impressionistic sonic sketches—beautiful certainly, but still sketches.
The result is an album that often seems like it’s barely begun before “From The Rue Vilin” closes things with a mournful piano tune that seems most appropriate for wandering through the fog-cloaked, rain-soaked streets of some eastern European city—that, or for the end credits of the most depressing Kieslowski film you’ve ever seen. But in a curious way, that quick passing, that transience, only adds to the album’s overall effect as it’s perfectly inline with the nostalgic themes so clearly associated with Murakami’s writings.
Max Richter - Songs From Before (flac 157mb)
01 Life 6:37
02 Good Times 7:44
03 Air Song (Remix) 7:54
04 Passage 7:40
05 Water Silence 6:00
06 Blue Moon Station 7:52
07 Small Little Green Cubes 9:47
08 Something Crystal 8:40
09 Filteria - Cloud-Kingdom (Solar Fields Remix) 10:45
10 In Motion (Good Morning Edit) 11:26
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The acclaim Max Richter has earned for works like The Blue Notebooks hasn't tempted him to outdo himself with ever more elaborate, grandiose projects -- in fact, 24 Postcards in Full Colour is just the opposite: a collection of pieces intended as ringtones, the album's longest track is a petite two-minutes-and-fifty-some seconds, and its palette is restricted to solo piano, string quartet, acoustic guitar, and less obvious sources such as shortwave radio transmissions and transistors. The album's unique format is admirable -- there's no reason why everyday sounds like ringtones can't be as thoughtfully made, and beautiful in their own way, as larger pieces of music -- especially because the same care that goes into Richter's longer works is evident throughout 24 Postcards in Full Colour. Many of the electronic pieces offer snapshots of the world around us: "Tokyo Riddle Song" and "When the Northern Lights/Jasper and Louise" sound like messages from chattering satellites that have been bouncing around the atmosphere, while "The Road Is a Grey Tape" could pass for a duet between rushing wind and a purring engine. The string and piano-based pieces, meanwhile, offer interior glimpses; "This Picture of Us P."'s contemplative melody stirs up more emotions in its 90 seconds that might be thought possible, while "Berlin by Overnight"'s strings are impatient to get to their destination. These worlds come together on "A Sudden Manhattan of the Mind," which is as bustling as it is poignant, and "A Song for H Far Away," which blends guitar, cello, and bad cell phone reception into something transporting. This may be Richter's shortest album, but it's also his most eclectic and emotional work, a mosaic of brief but beautiful wishes for contact and a powerfully inspiring way of making what could be mundane into something artful, even if it's just for a moment.
Max Richter - 24 Postcards In Full Colour ( flac 153mb)
01 Burning View 7:28
02 Shifting Nature 2:40
03 Into The Sun 6:40
04 Forgiveness 9:20
05 Mountain King 14:24
06 Wave Cascade 5:04
07 Moving Lines 5:02
08 A Long Tailed Bird Whispered 1:37
09 Joshua's Shop 5:28
10 A Green Walk 1:52
11 Parallel Universe 8:08
12 The Daylight Carrier 6:32
13 Siren Song Of Glass 5:04
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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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Memoryhouse may be Max Richter's debut album, but he had been developing his unique mix of contemporary classical and electronics for years before it was released. He co-founded the Piano Circus ensemble, who commissioned and performed works by Arvo Pärt, Brian Eno, Philip Glass, and Steve Reich (all of whom were influential on Richter's own music), and used live sampling. He also collaborated with Roni Size and Future Sound of London on their groundbreaking 1996 album Dead Cities. Yet Memoryhouse, which is performed by the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra under conductor Rumon Gumba, doesn't feel derivative of any of Richter's previous projects; the album's pieces are rigorously composed but also highly emotive, seamlessly blending into a whole that feels like, well, a memory. Tracks such as "Europe, After the Rain" and "Maria, the Poet" exemplify the album's mix of Glass-style minimalism fused with evocative samples and field recordings, territory Richter covered even more brilliantly on his next album, The Blue Notebooks. The main melody on "Europe, After the Rain" surfaces here and there on Memoryhouse, taking different forms like "Untitled (Figures)"' delicate electronics and "Garden (1973)/Interior"'s drifting harpsichords and spoken word. "Sarajevo" and "The Twins (Prague)" underscore the album's Eastern European leanings, while pieces with short but descriptive song titles like "Landscape with Figure (1922)" and "Arbenita (11 years)" add to the feeling that they could soundtrack diary entries or captions on old photos. More dramatic tracks such as "Last Days" complement the intimacy of "Embers" and "Andras" nicely, and show the scope of Richter's abilities. An homage to Europe and the haunting power of memories, Memoryhouse is a stunning first album that announced Max Richter as a major talent.
. Max Richter - Memoryhouse ( 297mb)
01 Europe, After The Rain 6:13
02 Maria, The Poet (1913)4:47
03 Laika's Journey 1:30
04 The Twins (Prague) 1:58
05 Sarajevo 4:03
06 Andras 2:42
07 Untitled (Figures) 3:27
08 Sketchbook 1:54
09 November 6:21
10 Jan's Notebook 2:41
11 Arbenita (11 Years) 7:04
12 Garden (1973) / Interior 3:24
13 Landscape With Figure (1922) 5:14
14 Fragment 1:26
15 Lines On A Page (One Hundred Violins) 1:22
16 Embers 3:38
17 Last Days 4:18
18 Quartet Fragment (1908) 3:02
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Though his evocative debut album Memoryhouse introduced Max Richter's fusion of classical music, electronica and found-sounds (a style he calls "post-Classical"), it's his follow-up, The Blue Notebooks, that really showcases the style's -- and Richter's -- potential. The album's ten pieces were inspired by Kafka's Blue Octavo Notebooks, and quotes such as "Everyone carries a room about inside them. This fact can even be proved by means of the sense of hearing. If someone walks fast and one pricks up one's ears and listens, say at night, when everything round about is quiet, one hears, for instance, the rattling of a mirror not quite firmly fastened to the wall," which are read by actress Tilda Swinton, define the spare, reflective intimacy of The Blue Notebooks. The album is simpler than Memoryhouse, with a smaller ensemble of musicians playing on it and a shorter running time, but its restraint makes it a more powerful work -- it's so beautiful and fully realized that it doesn't need to be showy. As other reviews have mentioned, Richter tends to be a more traditional-minded composer than influences like Brian Eno, Philip Glass and Steve Reich. However, his sound works so well and seems so natural because he's not trying to be overtly experimental; the album ranges from pieces with little or no electronic elements, such as the piano-driven "Arboretum," to "Old Song," which is based on a busy, chilly beat that sounds like dripping water. Richter's music embraces all of the sounds that had an impact on him, but more important is the emotional impact that The Blue Notebooks has on its listeners; despite its high-concept origins, it's quite an affecting album. The warm-hearted piano melody on "Horizon Variations" and the delicate, somehow reassuring-sounding string piece "On the Nature of Daylight" both sound vaguely familiar, and are all the more haunting for it. Most striking of all is "Shadow Journal," which begins with hypnotic, bubbling electronics, Swinton's crisp voice and a piercingly lovely violin melody and then brings in harp and an electronic bassline so low that it's almost felt more than it is heard. The piece sounds so much like thinking, like turning inward, that the cawing birds at the end of the track bring a jarring end to its reverie. The field recordings that run through The Blue Notebooks heighten the sense of intimacy, and occasionally, eavesdropping. On "Organum," the distant piano and outdoor sounds feel like listening to somebody else listen to the music; meanwhile, the ticking clocks, clacking typewriter and street traffic on the title track help conjure up that room that everyone carries about inside them. The Blue Notebooks is a stunning album, and one that should be heard not just by classical and electronica fans, but anyone who values thoughtful, subtly expressive music.
Max Richter - The Blue Notebooks (flac 172mb)
01 Level Out 8:55
02 Magic Eye (Remix) 10:02
03 Sol (Remix) 7:30
04 Spiritual Ocean 6:49
05 Levitate 11:23
06 Insum (Remix) 8:17
07 H.U.V.A. Network - Rain Geometry (Solar Fields rmx) 7:51
08 Respiratory Rate 7:50
09 The Sight Is White 7:26
10 Third Time (T Version) 8:16
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For his album, Songs From Before, Max Richter works with the same basic formula that served him so well on 2004’s The Blue Notebooks. That is, combining spoken word pieces with elegiac string arrangements, field recordings, and subtle electronics. But whereas The Blue Notebooks‘s pieces were built around Tilda Swinton’s readings of Franz Kafka, Songs From Before uses Robert Wyatt’s readings of various Haruki Murakami texts as embellishment.
Which, on the whole, works remarkably well. Richter’s string arrangements and subtle programming and electronics creates a mood that lethargic, dreamlike, melancholy mood that is perfectly suited to the themes of loss, nostalgia, and alienation that permeate Murakami’s work.
Listening to tracks such as “Song” and “Harmonium”, it’s difficult to not imagine yourself as Toru Okada, the protagonist of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (arguably Murakami’s most famous novel), as he wanders through menacing, forlorn dreamworlds. “Sunlight” is one of the album’s most beautiful tracks, with its keening, swaying violin melodies that do indeed seem bathed in light—albeit the light that emanates from distant memories of childhood, memories that, through the passing of years, have become stained with loss and regret. Wyatt’s readings of such Murakami texts as Sputnik Sweetheart and Norwegian Wood meld quite extraordinarily with Richter’s arrangements. As Wyatt reads “I’d venture into the city with the first gray of dawn and walk the deserted streets, and when the streets started to fill with people, I holed up back indoors to sleep” on “Flowers For Yulia”, Richter slowly builds up the piece, moving from distant, static-laden radio recordings to swelling strings that are both beautiful and portentous. Meanwhile, fragments of voices drift through the static, barely audible but still adding yet another layer of eeriness to the proceedings—the way they might seem to the text’s protagonist as he drifts off to sleep, seeking to avoid human contact even as it hovers around him. In one of the album’s most stirring moments, Wyatt reads a passage from Sputnik Sweetheart about the fragility and fleetingness of all things beautiful. As his worn voice trails off, emphasizing the final, sad words, Richter’s crystalline electronics swirl about in a spectral manner. Their hollow, ringing tones communicate the exact same tone of mono no aware—the sadness and passing of things—that is affecting and stirring in a way that words, no matter how beautiful they might be, simply cannot achieve. While the combination of spoken word and more classical elements might smack of pretense, Richter manages to avoid that entirely. As with The Blue Notebooks, the results here are very affecting. If there’s one complaint, it’s that half of the tracks on Songs From Before clock in around a minute or so (the disc as a whole falls under 40 minutes). As such, many of them feel more impressionistic sonic sketches—beautiful certainly, but still sketches.
The result is an album that often seems like it’s barely begun before “From The Rue Vilin” closes things with a mournful piano tune that seems most appropriate for wandering through the fog-cloaked, rain-soaked streets of some eastern European city—that, or for the end credits of the most depressing Kieslowski film you’ve ever seen. But in a curious way, that quick passing, that transience, only adds to the album’s overall effect as it’s perfectly inline with the nostalgic themes so clearly associated with Murakami’s writings.
Max Richter - Songs From Before (flac 157mb)
01 Life 6:37
02 Good Times 7:44
03 Air Song (Remix) 7:54
04 Passage 7:40
05 Water Silence 6:00
06 Blue Moon Station 7:52
07 Small Little Green Cubes 9:47
08 Something Crystal 8:40
09 Filteria - Cloud-Kingdom (Solar Fields Remix) 10:45
10 In Motion (Good Morning Edit) 11:26
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The acclaim Max Richter has earned for works like The Blue Notebooks hasn't tempted him to outdo himself with ever more elaborate, grandiose projects -- in fact, 24 Postcards in Full Colour is just the opposite: a collection of pieces intended as ringtones, the album's longest track is a petite two-minutes-and-fifty-some seconds, and its palette is restricted to solo piano, string quartet, acoustic guitar, and less obvious sources such as shortwave radio transmissions and transistors. The album's unique format is admirable -- there's no reason why everyday sounds like ringtones can't be as thoughtfully made, and beautiful in their own way, as larger pieces of music -- especially because the same care that goes into Richter's longer works is evident throughout 24 Postcards in Full Colour. Many of the electronic pieces offer snapshots of the world around us: "Tokyo Riddle Song" and "When the Northern Lights/Jasper and Louise" sound like messages from chattering satellites that have been bouncing around the atmosphere, while "The Road Is a Grey Tape" could pass for a duet between rushing wind and a purring engine. The string and piano-based pieces, meanwhile, offer interior glimpses; "This Picture of Us P."'s contemplative melody stirs up more emotions in its 90 seconds that might be thought possible, while "Berlin by Overnight"'s strings are impatient to get to their destination. These worlds come together on "A Sudden Manhattan of the Mind," which is as bustling as it is poignant, and "A Song for H Far Away," which blends guitar, cello, and bad cell phone reception into something transporting. This may be Richter's shortest album, but it's also his most eclectic and emotional work, a mosaic of brief but beautiful wishes for contact and a powerfully inspiring way of making what could be mundane into something artful, even if it's just for a moment.
Max Richter - 24 Postcards In Full Colour ( flac 153mb)
01 Burning View 7:28
02 Shifting Nature 2:40
03 Into The Sun 6:40
04 Forgiveness 9:20
05 Mountain King 14:24
06 Wave Cascade 5:04
07 Moving Lines 5:02
08 A Long Tailed Bird Whispered 1:37
09 Joshua's Shop 5:28
10 A Green Walk 1:52
11 Parallel Universe 8:08
12 The Daylight Carrier 6:32
13 Siren Song Of Glass 5:04
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Nice one, many thanks. I'm sitting on a bunch of his soundtracks that I still haven't gotten around to yet, but "Sleep" alone made me want to try to pick up everything I could, and these hadn't popped up for me yet, so looking forward to them.
ReplyDeleteAlso, I know there's nothing you can do about it, and we all appreciate the fact you spread stuff around different places for maximum ease, but those multihost sites are getting really nasty with their pop-ups and - even more so - all the underneath-ad stuff that run and just lock everything up for minutes. The ones that go straight to the source seem to work a little better. Just an FYI. But do what you meed to do. Your work is appreciated!