Album Review : Max Richter - Infra
- Written by Sam Cleeve
“Memory and desire, stirring/Dull roots with spring rain” - two lines taken from the opening of T.S. Eliot’s hugely significant modernist poem, ‘The Waste Land’. In the context of Max Richter’s newest release Infra, the poem acts as the inspirational forefather behind the work, first informing the dance of choreographer Wayne McGregor, who personally asked Richter to create a twenty-five minute score to his ballet (and collaboration with artist Julian Opie) for The Royal Opera House. There’s a conceptual truth behind these words that can be heard throughout Infra. It’s certainly a dual-faceted record, oscillating in choice of instrumentation between more traditional classical genres such as the string quintet or works for solo piano, to the strict parameters of Richter’s finely measured static hum – perpetually contrasting the “dull roots” with the “spring rain”, flickering between “memory” and “desire”.
As a single entity, the album holds as much of the distinctive somberness and funereal tenor as you could ask for. The gentle and minimal rolling piano of ‘Journey 1’ pays homage to one Philip Glass, while the tranquil lilt of ‘Infra 3’ evokes scenes of oceanic waves rather than mirroring Opie’s pedestrian art. While it is true that Infra is full of Richter’s trademark musical vernacular, there are tracks that offer more vitality than any of his previous output. But this is as you’d expect, of course. I’m no expert, but the bracing flow of ‘Infra 5’ seems much more like an accompaniment to a piece of contemporary dance than the likes of ‘On The Nature Of Daylight’ ever could. There’s the occasional percussive element that also sounds less than Richterian, whether it be subtle – such as the soft sonar pulses on ‘Journey 3’ – or perhaps more pronounced – I’m thinking of the steady rhythm that underpins the earlier ‘Journey 2’. It’s never enough to withdraw the music from well within the Richter canon, but its presence is noticeable nonetheless.
I suppose I feel petit taking issue with such a trivial annoyance, (and that’s just what it is, an annoyance), but the only real fault I can draw from the record is the overuse of a specific electronic sonority. For want of a better phrase, it’s that R2-D2 noise, often discreetly panned to the right, but always a minute niggling detail. It’s there on ‘Journey 1’, on ‘Infra 2’, on ‘Journey 3’, on ‘Journey 5’. Of course, it’s featuring on so many of the tracks may be forgiven as a tool to aid continuity, an element thrown in to help the cohesion of what is, lest we forget, one continuous work, rather than a collection of distinct tracks, but for me it just seems to distract from the profoundly meditative state that lies at the centre of Richter’s music.
In all, Infra offers but more of what you might expect from Richter - a series of relatively short contemporary classical works, interspersed with more unconventional ambient electronic experiments, the two often married, coalescing to produce something continually involving and never tired. You begin to wonder what it is about Richter’s music that seemingly lets him repeatedly apply the same formula to his music, where other blogosphere-lauded delegates of the classical world (see: Jóhann Jóhannsson, Ólafur Arnalds, Greg Haines) might soon become abandoned as unimaginative and threadbare. Maybe it is best not to know. For now at least, the invitation to step within his motionless, distilled, monochrome Polaroid compositions remains as appealing as ever.