Max Richter - Infra reviews

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Max Richter - Infra



Max Richter - Infra review


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   Pitchfork
Max Richter's music could broadly be classified as neo-classical, or ambient, or electro-acoustic chamber music. These descriptors give you an idea of his sound, but they don't tell you what the music feels like. So while I can recognize those generic touchstones, I hear Richter's music first as night music, sound that makes darkness feel alive. I don't tend to associate music with a mood or a time of day or a season, but I like to listen to his albums when I'm working late. I have an iTunes playlist called "That Feeling" (so-called because it's something I can't quite name), and it is 50% Richter. His music both captures a specific atmosphere and also feels internal.

Infra fairly brims with these qualities. Scored for piano, electronics, and string quartet, it's an expansion of a 25-minute piece Richter wrote for a collaboration with choreographer Wayne McGregor and artist Julian Opie. The latter contributed video projections of scenes from everyday life that ran behind the dancers. I can see how the music might complement the piece. His work has an amazing ability to interact with and elevate banality. It's not an uncommon trick to pair a mundane shot-- two businessmen shaking hands, someone cleaning out a garage, birds landing on a wire-- with slow and pretty music. But when it's done well, such juxtapositions still have the power to turn the everyday rigmarole we're seeing onscreen into something emotionally charged.

It's as though music allows us to see the melancholy or even futility of activities we take for granted. The more mundane the activity and the more achingly gorgeous the music, the more we feel the effect. And this music is achingly gorgeous. It's also uncomplicated. If one were to transcribe it, it would look childishly simple on the page: long, held notes, a few repeating phrases locked together, some strings working their way through a chord progression, note by note. But it's not the substance of the music that matters so much as the way it's all put together, and the way the composer understands timbre and what it can suggest. Here, on "Infra 7", Richter pulls the strings through electronic processing to give them a hollow, glassy tone that's completely at odds with the sound of vibrating strings bouncing off wood, the dominant sound of the rest of the album. And by setting you momentarily outside of the rich texture he's acclimated you to, he makes you feel all the more at home when it comes back, full bore, on "Infra 8"....full text

   Bbc
Once upon a time, rock‘n’roll was for the kids. Parents recoiled at its immoral noise, clutching Perry Como records to their chests as their children rolled their eyes. For years the generations were separated: teenagers craved guitars, elders praised violins, youthful tastes discarded as newfound responsibilities demanded they behave like adults.

But slowly the boundaries came down: prog rock embraced the theories of formal musical training, contemporary classical music like Steve Reich’s was embraced by the rock avant-garde, musicians started to namecheck the likes of Henryk Gorecki and Arvo Pärt. Now, it seems, you’ve got every chance of finding what used to be termed classical music on your favourite indie label. 4AD have Jóhann Jóhannsson, Bella Union have Dustin O’Halloran, Erased Tapes have Ólafur Arnalds, and Fat Cat’s 130771 imprint has Max Richter. These days, of course, it’s considered experimental music, but that’s probably only within the realms of pop.

Of them all, Richter deserves the tag experimental more than most. A classically trained performer with a fondness for electronica, his fifth album is based upon 25 minutes of music commissioned by London’s Royal Ballet in 2008 and inspired by T. S. Eliot’s The Wasteland. Opener infra 1 begins with radio static before slowly developing into what might pass for the introduction to a Sigur Rós song, and this in turn slides into journey 1, a piece of minimalist piano moonlight still haunted by static. infra 4 and journey 4, meanwhile, seem him employ the same ethic with strings instead of piano, and for infra’s 32-minute duration, Richter plays with echoing tones of ambiguous genesis and further found sounds over a platform of tremulous chamber music and placid piano sonata movements....full text

   Avclub
For a self-described “post-classical” composer who’s taken cues from such heady source material as Kafka’s Blue Octavo Notebooks and Haruki Murakami, many of Max Richter’s best compositions are appealingly middlebrow pieces for piano or string quartet—dramatic enough to drive home a scene in Shutter Island, but more restrained than Richter’s most obvious antecedents, Steve Reich and Philip Glass. Infra is a palimpsest of a score commissioned by the Royal Ballet, fleshed out with Richter’s usual undulating, escalating violin and piano interludes. Coils of complex melody emerge from the same static-y short-wave radio wrappers that he employed on 24 Postcards In Full Color, but here, they feel like an attempt to avant-garde up tracks that, while lovely, are overly familiar and rarely arresting. “Infra 2” buoys up the album a bit, gently laying mournful strings down in a bed of ambient fuzz next to a high, fluttering tone that fades in and out with the insistence of a lighthouse beam. “Infra 5” makes the case for Richter’s burgeoning career as a film composer, with keening strings and the signature second wind of The Blue Notebooks’ “The Trees.” Ultimately, nothing here can compare to that emotionally taxing album, and it’s hard not to wish Infra indulged in a few more grand jetés instead of spending so much time going through the motions at the balance beam....full text

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