Max Richter: 24 Postcards In Full Colour (Fatcat CD/LP/digital)
English composer Max Richter returns to Fatcat for a fourth album of instrumental beauties. 24 Postcards veers off the path from its predecessors, however, in its format and concept. Richter's original intent was for each of these to be a ringtone. On his microsite dedicated to the project, he asks the question, "Who says that ring tones have to be so bad?" He wanted to create a series of vignettes to be used by people as they pleased on their phones, as a way to test the waters so to speak for ringtones as a viable music performance platform. He even goes so far as to point toward potential live space performances where the audience's phones will essentially perform the music, and Richter himself would be the "conductor" or enabler by texting or calling the audience to prompt the music. It all gets a bit grand, especially considering how miniature these pieces of music are... so what then of the music itself?
Some of Richter's previous efforts were grand in their own purely musical right, deceiving in what at first seemed overly simplistic music that would often undulate and build with a certain amount of stealth into something more aspirational and far-reaching. The 24 short ringtone pieces collected here share the same approximate tone of voice of his previous work, each one crafted for electronics, strings and piano to varying degrees. Each one cloys with a bit of yearning, that sort of earnest melancholy that Richter is so good at. Because they are so bite-sized, they often feel like intimate moments, snapshots into a specific spot within someone's emotional train of thought. They all work well together, and although Richter obviously intended these more as one-offs rather than a proper album, it flows quite well in the ordering he's compiled here. Some of the pieces are stark and wistful ("This Picture Of Us. P.," "A Sudden Manhattan of the Mind") while others are more oblique and textural ("Cathodes," "The Road Is A Grey Tape," "Tokyo Riddle Song"). They are also at different turns sweet & romantic ("Lullaby From The Westcoast Sleepers," "The Tartu Piano," "Berlin By Overnight") or nostalgic and slightly more ephemeral ("In Louisville At 7," "A Song For H / Far Away").
I'm not sure why I find these little overtures to be so compelling. Perhaps I can't help but envision my own postcards to accompany them (the microsite's own interactive interface notwithstanding), or even take it a step further and imagine what particular moment in a character's life Richter is scoring. Many of these small pieces bring a large gravity with them, and that something that is essentially an experiment in brevity is able to conjure up imagery or emotions on such an oversized scale is a testament to Richter's panache for moving his audience.
mp3s: H In New England | A Sudden Manhattan Of The Mind | Kierling/Doubt
more info: Official artist site | 24 Postcards project microsite | Fatcat album detail
buy it: Fatcat shop | Boomkat | Bent Crayon | Forced Exposure | Amazon mp3 | iTunes | Emusic