CultureCritic talks to Max Richter...

Max Richter is a composer whose music combines elements of classical and electronica. His new album, ‘infra', began as a Royal Ballet commission to score a performance choreographed by Wayne McGregor, with visuals provided by artist Julian Opie. His previous releases include ‘24 Postcards in Full Colour', a collection of miniatures intended as ringtones, and 2004's much-admired ‘The Blue Notebooks'. The German-born British composer is based in Edinburgh and spoke to us from a studio in Berlin.

­­You have referred to the influence of literature on your music, and the Wayne McGregor performance that you scored was inspired by T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land. How did you absorb the poem while composing, and did any other influences creep in?

Like lots of people, I read The Waste Land as a teenager. It's just one of those texts that seems to address so many of the common anxieties and crises that we have living in the contemporary world. It made a big impact on me then, but I hadn't looked at it for a long time - [not for] years and years. And then Wayne came up with it as a source for our project. It was actually wonderful to revisit it and think about those themes again. And it did seem to connect with a lot of the images and ideas that we had about the piece.

What was the process of working with Wayne McGregor and Julian Opie like? Did you work with one another closely, or did you work in isolation?

It was a sort of conversation through bits of material. Initially he said, "the brief for this piece is that it's 25 minutes long. Off you go and write some music."  So I just wrote a whole bunch of music to start off with. Then, slowly, we started to match it with bits of movement and ideas of structure and shape. Then we slowly crept our way towards this object. In common with pretty much every project, you don't really know what it is until you've made the thing, and you just grope around in the dark, kind of jettisoning your best-laid plans. It's fascinating just to try and discover what a piece is by that sort of process.

How do you feel that ‘infra' differs as standalone album from its use in the context of dance?

When I started, I just recorded the score from the ballet itself. And then I started going through things and started assembling, and I realised that it was the tip of the iceberg, really. There was an awful lot of other material that, for one reason or another, we decided not to use. And then I started thinking about the idea that we were taking away two of the elements and leaving just the music on its own. So it immediately gave an opportunity to try and build a narrative with just the music, leaving out the dance and the visuals completely. We were taking away two of our senses and just concentrating on the storytelling aspect of the music. So then I started to follow the material as I would if I were making an album, just being quite instinctive with how things fitted together and what seemed to make sense.

Could you tell us a little bit about the concept behind the performance and the album?

The title, ‘infra', means ‘below'. Obviously there's a physical below on the stage; there are these animated figures that seem to hover in space and then you have these live dancers underneath, so there's this kind of counterpoint. The music is also very enveloping; it's not punchy and in-your-face, it's sort of amniotic. I always think that ‘infra' feels like you dream the whole thing. It creeps up on your subconscious. So I guess that's another reference for this idea of things below. The whole piece is like a trance. I think there's something very affecting about that.

It would seem that recordings of historical works have a much stronger presence than works by contemporary composers. Why do you think this is the case?

There just seems to be a resurgence of interest in instrumental music - in music that is written down, and I suppose a lot of that we could talk about as classical, but there are also shades of grey in all these forms of music where you're incorporating other things and other traditions. At one level, all music is about other music, whether that's a four-piece guitar band referencing My Bloody Valentine or whether it's someone like me referencing Schubert. We're all just kind of reconfiguring these things for our own uses. All artists probably do that to some extent.

You seem to be an artist who is considerate of how others will respond to the sounds you create, which is obviously a necessary approach when composing a soundtrack, for example. When creating your own albums do you ever feel like indulging yourself in a way that might alienate some of your listeners, or is the artist / audience equation not one that feels particularly relevant to your musical philosophy?

I just write the music I'd like to hear and I suppose I have to just keep doing that. That for me feels natural and is the only reason I do music at all - to do exactly what I want. I love it when other people are enthusiastic about these sounds and enjoy them, but I can't really think about that too much or it would be like self-censoring. I write what I write out of a sort of obsessive compulsiveness, so I don't think I could censor it anyway. 

Many different terms have been used to describe your work and you have a unique musical background, with heavy involvement in both minimal composition and electronic music. Is there a term you prefer to be used in reference to your work, and how do you position yourself in relation to classical music?

I have a dual background, which is classical music and more experimental electro and orchestral - a strange hybrid. The music I write reflects my listening. I'm a music fan and I'm just part of that bigger conversation.

Terminology is a strange one because it's a marketing tool and not really a listening tool. I once described this stuff as ‘post-classical' as a bit of a joke. Unfortunately, quite a few of people took it seriously, so it's this word that's out there now. Which is a bit odd because I didn't really intend it in a serious way.

I don't think there's a straightforward, snappy one-liner about what I do. It floats between these various worlds. It's mostly written on paper, although some of it isn't. Some of it is made with a tape recorder and analogue synthesisers. Some of it is recorded live and some of it isn't - it's manufactured in the studio. It really is a hybrid and I just follow the material where it leads me. 

You have used a lot of interesting sounds on your recordings that are generated by things other than musical instruments. Do you have a particular method for gathering these?

I walk around with little omnidirectional microphones in my ears. They look like headphones, so people don't know that you're just kind of listening. I'm just recording the whole time. And I'm in love with radio. Like pretty much everyone, I got into music via the radio and John Peel. It's an incredible thing. The sound of radio and the analogue quality of radio is very important to me as a medium. For example, in ‘infra' there's lots of shortwave. There's kind of Morse code and stuff like that. As well as being nice sonic textures in their own right, they do have an associative quality that I really enjoy.

Do you have any favourite writers and is there any literature you would like to use as a basis for new works in the future?

Yeah, literature's really important to me. It's probably as important as music in a funny sort of way. And I do think that music is a branch of storytelling. It's just another way to tell stories and stories to me are really central to everything. So I read all the time and I'm constantly hunting ideas and tracking down thoughts. There are a couple of literature-based projects that I'm planning over the next couple of years, but I don't think I can talk about them yet. 

Which contemporary composers do you admire, and what music have you enjoyed recently?

I like a lot of classical composers and a lot of minimal music; I'm very interested in that. The very early Philip Glass stuff is brilliant and that's one of the things that got me into music in the first place - the very tough, hardcore minimalist pieces that he was doing in the early 1970s. Things like Music with Changing Parts and Music in Contrary Motion and all these things that are really proto-trance music. Also early Terry Riley, multi-keyboard, freaky-tuning things like ‘Shri Camel' and stuff like that. And then I've been listening to a lot of Baltic contemporary composers like Urmas Sisask, Erkkie-Sven Tuur and Arvo Pärt, who I love very much. The last couple of Autechre albums are amazing. Unbelievable. It's very good to have them back, actually, as they've been away too long. The new one, ‘Move of Ten', is quite different; it's very full-on. They're such a talented band.

What projects do have lined up for the near future?

I'm doing a big project for next year called ‘Voices from the Black Sights', which is three albums. Or maybe it's one piece spread over three albums, which I'm quite deeply into at the moment...

Max Richter's 'infra' is out now on FatCat. Click here to read the latest reviews.