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Max Richter

In A Landscape

Decca Records
Release Date: September 20, 2024

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Movement, Before All Flowers (Visualiser)
FACT: From Studio To Screen: Becoming A Composer
Insight Germany
1 They Wiill Shade Us With Their Wings  
2 Life Study I  
3 A Colour Field (Holocene)  
4 Life Study II.  
5 And Some Will Fall  
6 Life Study III  
7 The Poetry of Earth (Geophony)  
8 Life Study IV  
9 Only Silent Words  
10 Life Study V  
11 Late and Soon  
12 Life Study VI  
13 Andante  
14 Life Study VII  
15 A Time Mirror (Biophony)  
16 Life Study VIII  
17 Love Song (after JE)  
18 Life Study IX  
19 Movement, Before All Flowers  
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Max Richter is one of the most influential and acclaimed composers of all time. His fusion of classical technique and electronic technology, heard across genre-defining solo albums and countless scores for film, dance, art and fashion, has won him legions of fans around the world and blazed a trail for a generation of musicians.

His ninth solo album – the first to be written and recorded at his serene new studio in rural Oxfordshire – is a fleeting self-portrait of a musician in constant motion. In A Landscape is a record about “reconciling polarities,” as Richter puts it, bringing together the electronic and the acoustic, the human and the natural world, the big questions of life and the quiet pleasures of living.

The 19-track album began life in summer 2022 as a natural counterweight to the urgent political tenor of his previous projects: Exiles, a ballet score about the refugee crisis, and Voices, constructed with a “negative orchestra” and hundreds of readings of the Universal Declaration Of Human Rights. Richter’s ongoing commissions, meanwhile, were similarly dramatic and conceptual, including a ballet adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s post-apocalyptic MADDADDAM, music for a Mark Rothko retrospective, and scores for Johan Renck’s sci-fi drama Spaceman and the Elisabeth Moss spy thriller The Veil.

The next project called for a recalibration. Shifting focus to Richter’s immediate surroundings, In A Landscape marks out a psychic space in which to meditate on the present while recognising a lifetime of artistic influence, from Bach and Purcell to the poetry of Keats, Wordsworth and Anne Carson. “It’s me having a look around, trying to examine where I'm at,” he suggests, “like a memoir of the present moment.”

In A Landscape is his first solo album recorded at Studio Richter Mahr, the minimalist, eco-conscious creative retreat designed and operated by Richter and his wife, visual artist Yulia Mahr. “The whole building is like an instrument,” he says. “There's an element of exploring the capabilities of the building, how all the spaces sound, all the textures, and trying to dicover the fingerprint it has.”

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