Style: Modern Classical/Ambient
Country: UK
Label: 130701
Format: MP3@CBR, 320 kbps
Size: 80 mb
About Release:
Following eighteen months after Edinburgh-based pianist / composer Max Richter’s last album comes the release of the gorgeous, intriguingly framed ’24 Postcards In Full Colour’. Richter’s fourth album is a dazzling conceptual exercise of great beauty and emotional resonance. Certainly his most concise, ’24 Postcards…’may also be Max’s most coherent and compelling work to date. Beautifully played, richly textured and detailed, the album foregrounds Max’s sheer class as a composer and producer.An attempt an exploration of the ringtone as a vehicle for music performance , ‘24 Postcards…’ is an experimental work made up of 24 classically-composed ringtones, set to be premièred in various gallery spaces. The première is intended to be in the form of a series of installations where pre-registered audience members switch on their phones to receive SMS messages, each message alert playing back one or more of the tracks, so making up the performance. In tandem with this release, will be a micro-website hosting 24 photographic images, one accompanying each track. As Max explains: “Thinking about how we listen to music today, I wondered why it is that ringtones have so far been treated as unfit for creative music… Who says ringtones have to be bad?.. It’s like saying LPs or CDs are bad – its just a medium….”“Because the piece is a collection of tones, where I have no control of the order, I made a structure that holds together by use of shared material – like a cloud of pieces, or a handful of confetti, or a constellation of fragments – to be navigated as you like…” Max views the writing process in similar terms - shuffling basic elements into new constellations. The palette Max limited himself to consists of string quintet; solo piano; 16 track 2 inch tape; transistors; found shortwave radio; vinyl clicks, dust, scratches and rumble; and acoustic guitars. The players on the album are Louisa Fuller (violin),Robert Mc Fall (violin), Natalia Bonner (violin), John Metcalfe (Viola), Ian Burdge (Cello), Chris Worsey (Cello), Sua Lee (Cello), Preston Reed (Guitar), and Richter himself on piano.Fragmentary and partial by nature, these 24 brief tracks work as a varied collection of evocative miniatures - each offering a glimpse into potentially much larger pieces. The longest track here is just under three minutes, whilst the majority clock in at around just sixty seconds. Each bearing its own particular weight and measure, these haunting vignettes come across as a series of sketches on the (fugitive) nature of time and memory, stitched together to form a series of jump-cuts and foldbacks in time (the album continually reprising itself and filling the listener with a sense of deja-vu).As though extracting the absolute essence, simple, plaintive piano and string melodies - no excess, no waste, pure concentrate - butt up against passages of rich, borderzone ambience - radio static / voices leaking through dense, shifting drones. At points recalling the likes of Boards Of Canada, Bibio, and Gas (in terms of depth / grain rather than sound or style), at others Minimalism or the Elizabethan instrumental music of Henry Purcell, there’s also something about its nature that brings to mind authors like WG Sebald, Marcel Proust and filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky.
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