Max Richter - 24 Postcards In Full Colour (130701, 2008)

1 The Road Is A Grey Tape (1:01)
2 H In New England (1:50)
3 This Picture Of Us. P. (1:36)
4 Lullaby From The Westcoast Sleepers (2:02)
5 When The Northern Lights / Jasper And Louise (1:00)
6 Circles From The Rue Simon – Crubellier (1:04)
7 Cascade NW By W (1:12)
8 A Sudden Manhattan Of The Mind (2:51)
9 In Louisville At 7 (1:03)
10 Cathodes (1:01)
11 I Was Just Thinking (0:59)
12 A Song For H / Far Away (2:08)
13 Return To Prague (1:02)
14 Broken Symmetries For Y (1:00)
15 Berlin By Overnight (1:27)
16 Cradle Song For A (Interstate B3) (2:11)
17 Kierling / Doubt (0:50)
18 From 553 W Elm Street, Logan Illinois (Snow) (0:57)
19 Tokyo Riddle Song (1:00)
20 The Tartu Piano (2:05)
21 Cold Fusion For G (0:35)
22 32 Via San Nicolo (1:23)
23 Found Song For P. (2:24)
24 H Thinks A Journey (0:57)

Vingt-quatre titres. A peine plus de trente-trois minutes. Qu’est-il donc arrivé à Max Richter, guide de mes nuits de décembre 2004, quand j’avais découvert le bougre, un peu par hasard, via son “The Blue Notebooks”, album parfait de post-classicisme à la beauté fracassante. Lui qui aimait prendre son temps pour mieux développer ses mélodies encordées et pleines d’un piano délicat ?
Rien. Ou presque. Il a juste voulu écrire une sorte de concept album sur, tenez-vous bien, les sonneries de téléphones. Partant du postulat suivant «Pourquoi une sonnerie de téléphone devrait-elle être nulle?», il a donc composé 24 morceaux, tous de très courtes durées (de 50’’ à 2’51’’), qui pourraient, pour la plupart, faire office de ringtones (écoutez In Louisville At 7, c’est flagrant): “24 Postcards In Full Colour”.

Comme d’habitude, violons, violoncelles et piano sont au rendez-vous, avec en guest une guitare. Les ambiances propres à Max Richter, ces atmosphères planantes, vaporeuses et oniriques, elles aussi. Ce sont d’ailleurs elles qui servent de fil conducteur à cet album, dont chaque titre est différent de son prédécesseur et explore des univers parallèles.
Et si le procédé peut paraître assez frustrant parfois, tant on aimerait que l’Écossais développe ses titres et fasse muer quelques secondes de musique en un ensemble plus consistant, on ne peut quand même que s’incliner devant le talent de Max Richter, compositeur post-classique émérite, qui compose des albums comme d’autres font des rêves, et qui, avec ce “24 Postcards In Full Colour” nous invite à un voyage dans le beau, le doux, le planant et l’éphémère.

Benzine

The place where art music and pop music meet is today less a border than a bridge constantly filled with traffic flowing both ways. I like to think of German-born Max Richter as standing somewhere in the middle of that bridge, a modern composer with a pop musician's sense of conceptual unity, emotional connection, and payoff. His albums to date have played like post-minimalist classical for those who follow indie rock and electronic music-- they could lead a Mogwai fan to Arvo Pärt and Gavin Bryars, or a Pärt fan to Rachel's, Stars of the Lid, and Philip Jeck. The point is that he makes art music with broad appeal, miles from the kind of process pieces that are easier to read about than listen to.

Richter's latest takes a step into a part of the pop world few modern composers have approached: the ringtone. Old-school classical music has been there for a while-- I have friends with piano sonatas, Mozart snippets, and bits of Bach on their phones-- but Richter is one of the first to build an entire recording around this most ubiquitous man-made ambient noise. These 24 brief tracks (totaling around a half-hour) are theoretically all meant to tell you that Mom is calling, but don't come expecting the bassline to "Play That Funky Music", the pep of "Eine Kleine Nachtmusik", or anything similarly snappy. These pieces are almost entirely in the same somber vein of Richter's other work. If you want a ringtone that could stop everyone else in the produce aisle in his or her tracks with its beauty, this is for you.

The main musical aim here appears to be tonal variety. Richter places a minute of burbling, crackling ambient noise next to a painfully gorgeous minute of violins slipping in and out of harmony, or an arpeggiating electric guitar smothered in voices. The piano pieces are soft, contemplative, and a bit chilly-- they make me think of wearing a sweater while reading a thoughtfully written book by the light of a single lamp in an otherwise dark home. Autumnal is a word I occasionally see used to describe the feel of Richter's work, and it certainly applies here. These pieces are falling leaves and brisk breezes embodied in bow strokes, keystrokes, and electronic textures.

Richter has discussed the possibility of performing shows using these pieces as ringtones on his audience's phones, controlling the music from the stage via text message-- I'd love to be at one of those shows to see how it feels as a droning violin or gently pulsing, organ-like tone spreads through the crowd. Setting the concept aside, this is a frequently haunting album, though it sacrifices a great deal of flow in the name of brevity and variety. Even if no one ever downloads it to a Nokia, the hair-raising violin of "A Sudden Manhattan of the Mind" makes its point just fine as part of the album. And that's the most important thing to remember about this album: the concept is strong, but the music is stronger.

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Max Richter - Songs From Before (130701, 2006)

1 Song (4:12)
2 Flowers For Yulia (6:50)
3 Fragment (1:41)
4 Harmonium (4:23)
5 Ionosphere (1:25)
6 Autumn Music 1 (3:54)
7 Time Passing (1:51)
8 Sunlight (5:35)
9 Lullaby (0:53)
10 Autumn Music 2 (3:49)
11 Verses (1:43)
12 From The Rue Vilin (1:02)

Après les très réussis Memory House et The Blue Notebooks, le roi anglais de l’ambiant, Max Richter, est de retour avec Songs From Before. C’est par l’intérmédiaire de ses carnets de notes bleus, publiés chez Fatcat, que l’allemand d’origine s’était fait connaître aux oreilles du plus grand nombre, dont nous faisions partie. Puis il nous avait convaincus à nouveau en accompagnant Vashti Bunyan pour son second album, l’an passé. Avec Songs From Before, sur 1130701, un sous-label de Fatcat dédié aux musiques plutôt ambiantes, Richter enfonce le clou et démontre une nouvelle fois que la musique néo-classique n’est pas une ennemie de la mélodie et de l’émotion. Car c’est bien cette dernière, ici, qui est au centre. Les pièces mélancoliques de Max Richter, montées à partir de violons, claviers, field recordings, voix (Robert Wyatt lisant Haruki Murakami, la classe), pianos et crissements informatiques, sont particulièrement évocatrices. Ces pièces "racontent" des airs parfaitement mélancoliques, qui évoquent l’esprit de Rachel’s, de Silver Mount Zion, Tiersen et autres Chauveau, mais aussi celui des complaintes cosmiques d’un Cliff Martinez ou de Brian Eno, ou encore de l’electronica minimale et abstraite. Avec son format très pop, ses douze titres pour à peine plus de trente-sept minutes, Songs From Before alterne les intermèdes aux accents électroniques, parfois accompagnés de voix, et les compositions romantiques et amples, expressives à souhait (Autumn Music 1 et 2, Flowers For Yulia). S’il semble à cet instant d’écoute et de digestion moins accompli que Blue Notebooks, Songs From Before n’en distille pas moins des mélopées hors d’âge, sobres et simplement belles. Des mélopées qui se répètent, lentement, subtilement, et qui laissent apercevoir, au lointain, un grand orchestre baignant dans la brume de l’aube.
Autres Directions

Max Richter's résumé becomes, nearly without exception, part and parcel to every review of his music: The German-born composer studied piano in Edinburgh and then at the Royal Academy of Music in London. He worked with electronics in Florence with Luciano Berio and co-founded Piano Circus, an ensemble devoted to work by 20th century composers such as Steve Reich and Arvo Pärt. In the mid-1990s, he collaborated with Future Sound of London, lending his piano and sampling experience to the long-running duo.

Sure, as paying dues in the field of new music goes, Richter's past is worthy of mention. But plundering his curriculum vitae also renders a certain logical lens for his work as a solo composer, a productive means of analyzing his self-described "post-Classical" compositions for strings, piano, electronics, and spoken word: When a Richter album-- especially his latest, Songs From Before-- is disassembled with his lineage in mind, its pieces are identifiable, clear precursors and allegiances made obvious. Electronic passages-- here, manipulated recordings of short-wave radio segments-- form both the underpinnings and segue sequences in Richter compositions. Their distant ambience reflects the foundations of Brian Eno's colossal ambient work (which Richter played with Piano Circus) and the corrupted warmth of Iannis Xenakis' best electronic pieces (which he studied with Ferio). Richter employees triads, so cinematic as they guide the perfect solstitial redolence of "Autumn Music 1", as freely and fondly as Pärt, and his rhythmic intricacy, so perfect as it guides the string-and-piano counterpoints of the splendid "Autumn Music 2", is an extension of Reich's pointillist thrust.

But, much as he did with 2004's beautiful The Blue Notebooks, Richter combines these disparate and proven ideas into fresh, emotive work. His central aesthetic of absolute taste-- from Robert Wyatt's staid readings of Haruki Murakami's writings to the gravitational rise of "Flowers for Yulia"-- is manifested, compositionally, through omnipresent motion. Richter's pieces are rarely still even if somewhat static, a facet epitomized by his strength with rubato, a classical technique for maintaining the essential meter of a passage by temporarily slowing or quickening the rhythm. It conjures an overwhelming emotional tizzy, bouts of rhythmic unpredictably guiding the familiar patterns of Richter's beloved minor triads. "Autumn Music 2" bridges these tendencies into a stunning manifesto where the strings and Richter's piano pull one another between poles of regret and redemption. Indeed, moments like these-- a four-minute emotional rapture, a 90-second string movement slightly damaged by radio receiver's static, a brief passage about true shades of blue-- show Richter's brilliance. By not distending his pieces in order to manifest his own dexterity, he does just that, squeezing multiple notions into slight spaces. The result is potency: Richter's music makes marionettes of otherwise reasonable people, his scoring hands the minor deities controlling strings capable of engendering instantaneous passions, regrets and decisions with simple melodic figures.

To that end, little here is ever belabored or iterative: This is quicker music for a quicker world, and it's Richter's most cohesive album to date. Of the 41 tracks he has released on the three albums billed under his own name, three of them breach seven minutes. None of these are on Songs From Before. This, very nearly, is pop music. Its self-aware brevity and dynamic could miff contemporaries in both classical and electronic music. But Richter is guided by proper artistic license: He understands that his predecessors-- from Brahms and Bach to Pärt and Glass-- made their marks in worlds apart from his own creative context, but that those composers borrowed liberally from the folk music (that is, the music at the center of their society's conscience) for the sake of source material and, quite simply, piqued audience interest. The Germans even had a word for Brahms' folk embodiments, and Beethoven lifted a Russian folk melody for a string quartet to please a Russian emissary. Richter takes techniques from the classics and modifies their approach to make more appropriate-- but no less efficacious-- statements for his own circumstances.

Given Songs From Before's thematic conceit, this is appropriate: Richter isn't interested in changing the way the world hears his music as much as idealizing how he wants to hear it. He resurrects past idols for present idioms, his heroes, proclivities and experiences donned as unrepentantly as the nostalgia at Songs' core.

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Max Richter - The Blue Notebooks (130701, 2004)

1 The Blue Notebooks (1:20)
2 On The Nature Of Daylight (6:11)
3 Horizon Variations (1:52)
4 Shadow Journal (8:22)
5 Iconography (3:38)
6 Vladimir's Blues (1:18)
7 Arboretum (2:53)
8 Old Song (2:11)
9 Organum (3:13)
10 The Trees (7:52)
11 Written On The Sky (1:39)

Il y a dans l'existence des joies musicales comparables à celle du coup de foudre amoureux. Au détour des allées encombrées de votre disquaire habituel, quelques notes s'envolent, arrêtent net votre élan, et vous vous trouvez saisi par cette brusque trouée de lumière, ayant perdu conscience du temps et de l'espace, réduit à l'attente éperdue de la note suivante. Le dernier morceau qui m'ait ainsi ébloui s'appelle - ce n'est pas un hasard - "On The Nature of Daylight" et c'est le second, peut-être le plus beau, du nouvel album signé par Max Richter. Élégie combustible introduite lento par les violoncelles, puis complètement dégagée de toute pesanteur par un duo de violons tournoyant en une parade amoureuse désespérée, le morceau s'impose avec force. Il s'en faut de peu pour que tout le disque, nourri au meilleur de la musique sérielle et ambient des trente dernières années (Reich, Glass, Eno, Pärt), se maintienne à cette hauteur d'inspiration. Entre minimalisme et expérimentation électronique, Richter a ainsi des trouvailles particulièrement fécondes : le mélange de percussions sourdes et de séquences mélodiques, l'échappée libre du violon dans "Shadow Journal", l'orgue répétitif et les choeurs de "Iconography", les délicats entrelacs de l'électronique et de l'acoustique sur "Arboretum".
Placé sous un haut patronage littéraire (Kafka, Czeslaw Milosz), son projet prend en outre la forme d'un concept-album réussi, la conception cédant toujours le pas à une intuition vagabonde, le minimalisme désamorçant le risque de l'emphase : régulièrement, un cliquetis de machine à écrire, la lecture de Tilda Swinton, les bruits captés dans l'environnement (croassements, sons de cloche), rappellent à l'auditeur qu'il se trouve bien dans l'exploration intime d'un univers littéraire qui restera simplement suggéré, inépuisable, non réductible à l'illustration sonore. Entre construction et sensibilité, hauteur de vue et modestie, tout semble avoir sa nécessité, et c'est presque à regret que l'on se prend à déplorer sur certains morceaux l'absence de développement du thème, ou une trop grande prégnance des modèles musicaux : par deux fois, les compositions pour piano rappellent de façon un peu voyante Philip Glass et Michael Nyman, étrange faute de goût chez un compositeur et pianiste par ailleurs si inspiré et maître de ses moyens. Faute cependant avouée et déjà pardonnée : tout le reste est superbe.
Popnews

Conceptually, Max Richter's The Blue Notebooks-- German-born composer mixes contemporary classical compositions with electronic elements in a dreamscapy journalogue featuring excerpts from Kafka's The Blue Octavo Notebooks as narrated by Tilda Swinton-- reads like a relentlessly precious endeavor, as new age music for grad students, the sort of record that sagely pats you on the back for being smart enough to seek it out. And yet in practice, despite the fact that it is exactly as outlined above, Kafka quotes and all, there is absolutely nothing exclusive or contrived-feeling about it. In fact, not only is Richter's second album one of the finest of the last six months, it is also one of the most affecting and universal contemporary classical records in recent memory.

But how to describe music that relies so completely on seeming familiar? Richter may fancy himself in a class with Philip Glass, Brian Eno and Steve Reich (indeed, his hyperattenuated sense of minimalism owes to all three), but unlike his influences, he's not remotely interested in subverting the traditional rules of composition. Short of one very beautiful moment that plunges an electronic sublow bassline into a deep sea of harpsichords and violas (see: the literally perfect "Shadow Journal"), there is nothing here to suggest that Richter is concerned with anything other than melody and economy. It's a formula he singlemindedly exploits with staggering effectiveness for the balance of the album's 40+ minutes.

Constituted mainly of sparse pieces that lean on string quartets and pianos in equal measure, The Blue Notebooks is a case study in direct, minor-key melody. Each of the piano pieces "Horizon Variations", "Vladimir's Blues" and "Written in the Sky" establish strong melodic motifs in under two minutes, all the while resisting additional orchestration. Elsewhere, Richter's string suites are similarly striking; "On the Nature of Daylight" coaxes a stunning rise out of gently provincial arrangements while the comparatively epic penultimate track "The Trees" boasts an extended introductory sequence for what is probably the album's closest brush with grandiosity. Richter's slightly less traditional pieces also resound; both the underwater choral hymnal "Iconography" and the stately organ piece "Organum" echo the spiritual ambience that characterized his work for Future Sound of London.

If, however, there is one piece that fires The Blue Notebooks off into the stratosphere, it's the aforementioned "Shadow Journal". Featuring a lone viola, some burbling electronics, a harpsichord and a subterranean bassline, it establishes a simple, keening melody and then gently pulls it wide, like warm string taffy, across its eight minutes. The fourth track on the record, it is nonetheless its centerpiece, and on a larger scale, possibly a gigantic beacon for composers searching for useful ways to introduce dance music's visceral, body-jarring qualities into the classical sphere.

But make no mistake, this is not Richter's electronic/classical crossover, nor it is really his concept record. In fact, with songs that similarly forgo the temptations of complexity and choice so as to preserve their core ideas, it's perhaps better thought of as his four-track demo, his lo-fi recording jaunt. It's Max Richter testing himself to see what he can produce under restraint. Turns out it's more than he might have otherwise.

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Hauschka - Room To Expand (130701, 2007)

1 La Dilettante (4:06)
2 Paddington (3:57)
3 One Wish (5:20)
4 Chicago Morning (4:56)
5 Kleine Dinge (4:04)
6 Belgrade (3:33)
7 Sweet Spring Come (3:53)
8 Femmeassise (4:04)
9 Watercolour Milk (4:29)
10 Zahnluecke (3:44)
11 Fjorde (3:38)
12 Old Man Playing Boules (3:21)

Après les réussis Substantial et The Prepared Piano (Karaoke Kalk, 2004 & 2005), Volker Bertelmann aka Hauschka délivre son nouvel opus sur le structure 1130701, sous-label de FatCat ayant accueilli Sylvain Chauveau, Set Fires To Flame ou encore Max Richter.

Ce changement de label s’accompagne d’une musique encore évoluée : le pianiste de Düsseldhorf a, soit, convié à nouveau les belles atmosphères mélancoliques qui étaient l’apanage de son premier album, les tentations rythmiques et les arrangements discrets qui étaient l’apanage du second, pour magnifier son art et écrire ce Room To Expand. Un opus habile, et varié.

Jeux de répétitions, façon Steve Reich, orchestré de bien belle manière, en ouverture (La Dilettante), ou exercice à la rythmique enlevée, presque électronique (Paddington), Room To Expand commence bien. One Wish marque un retour à la composition atmosphérique, mais à la mélodie palpable, à l’atmosphère contemplative, dont ont l’évolution est constante. Belgrade offre une autre vignette originale, avec ses instruments à vent. Il en va de même pour Sweet Spring Comes, basé sur un bruit métallique étonnant. Room To Expand prouve ainsi (encore une fois, serait-on tenté d’ajouter), morceau après morceau, que Bertelmann est devenu un maître du piano, entre passé, présent et futur, et un concepteur hors pair de scénettes variées, toujours touchantes.

Autres Directions

I know what you're thinking - another piano album, why should we care? Well it's time to start caring; Hauschka (aka German feller Volker Bertelmann) has somehow managed to cast off the shackles of a now hardly fresh sound to produce something deceptively simple and devastatingly effective. Firstly it's worth knowing what a prepared piano is, Bertelmann used this approach on his 2005 album 'The Prepared Piano' but here his ideas really come to fruition - using bits of leather, felt, paper, tin foil or whatever else he can find to wedge, strap and throw onto the piano strings to produce hisses, clicks, clatters and clanks giving the piano an almost sampled electronic feel. As these sounds are gently layered he comes up with something which is intelligently produced yet gorgeous and hugely enjoyable at the same time. The album's first real stand out moment (of many) comes from the second track 'Paddington' which takes looping phrases, plucked piano strings and clunking wooden percussion and builds them into a magnificent clamorous and almost poppy celebration of the age old instrument. Eventually he allows the introduction of subtle woodwind and the song comes to a fuzzy stuttering head sounding quite unlike anything you've heard before. Throughout the record there are of course references to classic film soundtracks, the work of the great composers, the Chicago post-rock sound of Tortoise and their offshoots, contemporary electronic music and the modern piano music of for example Max Richter or Goldmund but Bertelmann here has found his unique voice and has discovered how to express himself originally and powerfully. Take 'Chicago Morning', another real stand-out moment, which builds with such playful abandon it's hard not to imagine it accompanying equally emotive visuals - maybe the cynically melancholic film work of Todd Solondz or the off-kilter romantic naivety of Wes Anderson for example. It's impossible to stress the genuine love for music that's expressed here, there's no pandering to any style or genre, no pretentiousness - this is simply great music and reminds you that someone, somewhere still cares. Utterly gorgeous and frankly unmissable...
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Sylvain Chauveau - Un Autre Décembre (130701, 2003)

1 Minéral (3:26)
2 Sous Tes Yeux Probablement (1:16)
3 Granulation 1 (1:38)
4 Neuf Cents Lunes (3:56)
5 Alors La Lumière Vacille (1:07)
6 Granulation 2 (0:56)
7 Il Fait Nuit Noire A Berlin (2:12)
8 La Lettre Qu'Il N'Envoya Jamais (2:00)
9 Granulation 3 (1:35)
10 Un Autre Décembre (2:24)
11 Granulation 4 (1:26)
12 Du Rêve Dans Les Yeux (1:30)

...On retrouve ici cette approche minimale et mélodique du piano qui caractérise Chauveau, embrassant ses amours allant de Debussy à Satie, et son approche plus actuelle de la composition, plus pop, qui faisait le bonheur de Nocturne Impalpable. Avec ces douze titres discrets en à peine plus de vingt minutes, il nous offre ici son disque le plus "silencieux". Si parfois ce piano, à la sobriété exemplaire, où les accords sont rares, se pare de quelques atours électroniques (laptop), il s’efface plus souvent pour mieux souligner le silence qui l’entoure. Sans doute moins intéressant que son prédécesseur, voire un peu décevant, il reste tout de même un refuge dans lequel le corps et l’âme s’apaisent. A éviter toutefois après une déception amoureuse.
Autres Directions

12 short pieces for piano stretching just on 24 minutes, at first glance it may seem that this is the equivalent of those little books of hokey wisdom in which each page is devoted to a pithy little saying, but after having one's heart wrenched and soul stirred in the space of less than the time it takes to watch a sitcom one realises that this is far from an excursion in triviality or kitsch. It's just that each piece appears like an elegantly constructed sentence, complete with witty allusions, asides and delightful vocabulary, but it is soon evident that the nuance and subtlety conveyed would challenge even the most deft of poets, and perhaps allude all but the masters of Haiku. Chauveau strips away any hint of filigree or embellishment in his playing, letting arpeggiated chords sound until they decay, and single notes to drift and intermingle like curlicues of smoke. He also shows bravery in being unafraid to overlap with snatches of musique concrete, crackles and electric folds and a foreboding hiss that accompanies each of the pieces. Un Autre Decembre is one of those drifting pieces of ephemera in the ocean of sound that make life worthwhile.
Cyclic Defrost

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