Listening to Max Richter’s The Blue Notebooks for the first time, it’s hard to shake the impression that you’ve heard it before; you don’t feel so much that you’re discovering it, as being reunited with it. This is music which play games with one’s memories and one’s perception of time; music that obliterates the already blurred boundary between the conscious and unconscious mind.
Let’s back-track a little. Richter is best known as a classically-trained composer, albeit one with a keen and unusual interest in production and the way things sound. Inspired not only by the likes of Messiaen and Philip Glass (whose penchant for plangent piano arpeggios and a grand, romantic minimalism he audibly shares), but electronic artists as diverse as Basic Channel and Kraftwerk and, perhaps most crucially, post-rock outfits in the emotionally grandstranding Godspeed mould, Richter’s work might best be described as classical music in which the studio is the principal instrument. The title of his debut album, Memoryhouse, made explicit from the off Richter’s enduring thematic obsession, an obsession which matured into real artistry on The Blue Notebooks – only four years old and already regarded as a classic of “quiet music”. With a spoken narration from the actress Tilda Swinton, Richter paints an imaginary cityscape in which dreams and reality, past and present, collide and coalesce. Piano, violin, cello and viola figure prominently in the melancholic mix, but what’s truly remarkable is the rippling architecture of field recordings and “antique electronics” which is all-surrounding.
2006’s Songs From Before, was a similarly spell-binding affair, its melodic themes even more deeply submerged in an aqueous haze of tape delay, analogue synth layers and shortwave radio crackle. This was nothing less than classical music in dub – aesthetically aligned with the work of Philip Jeck, GAS and Pole, but a great deal more emotive. With Robert Wyatt taking over Swinton’s spoken word role, this is arguably Richter’s most impressive work to date. 2008 saw the softly-spoken but palpably enthusiastic British composer return to the fray with Music For 24 Postcards In Full Colour, a collection of 24 short sound-sketches which interrogate the idea of the ringtone [of which more later].
Richter’s reputation might rest largely on the aforementioned album sequence, but he’s been busy in all sorts of other ways over the past fifteen years. He worked with The Future Sound of London on their 1996 LP Dead Cities, and produced Vashti Bunyan’s sublime 2005 ‘comeback’ album Lookaftering. More recently, Richter provided the score for Ari Forlman’s animated memoir of his participation in the ’82 Lebanon War, the Oscar-nominated Waltz With Bashir.
As Fat Cat prepare to release deluxe vinyl editions of The Blue Notebooks and 24 Postcards in Full Colour, FACT spoke to Max about projects old and new, and the importance of the composer’s role as storyteller.
What were your early musical epiphanies? Where did music really begin for you?
“It all started with the milkman. When I was in my early teens the guy who delivered the milk noticed I was into music, so he would drop off all these crazy records for me to check out. In the morning outside the front door there would be two pints of milk, half a dozen eggs and the latest slice of hardcore minimalism by Philip Glass in the original LP format from Point Records…
“I always listened to a wide range of music, both classical and popular, so there are many many things that were important to me. Discovering Bach and then, as a teenager, earlier polyphonic music – Byrd, Tallis and the Elizabethans. Then the masterpieces of the 20th century and more recent music…Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, Messaien’s Quartet for The End of Time, Boulez’s Pli Selon Pli, and Le Marteau sans Maitre, Stockhausen’s Gruppen, and Carre and Trans. The music of Xenakis had a big impact, the ideas of John Cage, Takemitsu, Grisey, plus discovering the American minimalists.
“In the world of ‘popular’ music I was always into artists that really used the studio as an instrument in whatever genre, so that means the early electronic acts – Kraftwerk, etc, but also the psychedelic guitar-driven music of the late 60s, like early Pink Floyd, and the Studio One music of King Tubby et al. I was just fascinated by how machinery could evoke so much feeling and so much of a sense of (personal) stories being told.”
Unusually for an artist with a classical background, you seem to favour the recorded album – rather than, say, simply writing or performing a work – as your preferred means of artistic production. Is this fair to say? If so, why?
“I suppose because the music is made in the studio from the scores, the studio becomes part of the instrumentation – so the (vinyl) record is basic document. I’m devoted to the classic technology of recording – 2″ 16-track tape, analogue mixing, vinyl. That’s it for me – that’s the sound I love.
“Live performance is a great way to explore the material too, but it’s a different thing – audience dynamics, setting and various other factors all play a part. I do play live from time to time and have a great group of players I’ve been working with for years – they have recorded all my records too.
The magic of your albums lie at least as much in their studio production as in their composition and performance. At what point in your life or career did you begin to intuit the importance and potential of production and “ambient” sound?
“I have always been into sound – It’s an addiction really – I was the kid drooling over the low end or the drum sounds on Beatles records when everyone else was singing along to the vocals.”
“My life can be divided into the years before and after I heard the filter opening up on the bassline of Kraftwerk’s ‘Autobahn’. I don’t think I’ve got over it yet.
“The other thing that did it was Eno’s masterpiece, Discreet Music, with its mind-blowing B-side remix of the Pachelbel Canon. I wish I’d thought of that!”
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