THE BLUE S
On Blue s, Richter turns to Franz Kafkas fragmented Blue Octavo s, a small gnomic book of
self-scrutinising thought-experiments, unfinished sentences and passing whims for the overheard words of those shadows,
perhaps because he would want Kafka to come up with the term that describes his music - innermost - perhaps because
Kafka is his ideal front man - as long as he sounds like Tilda Swinton, with her particular poise and precision, her
talent to perceive perhaps because he identifies with how Kafkas words reflect a shaky, tentative, untraceable reality,
an inexplicable inner world occasionally illuminated by flashes of startling clarity.
SONGS FROM BEFORE
On Songs From Before, connected by various odd numbered doors and lonely corridors to s, but in another part of
space and time, another part of the brain, surrounded by a high brick wall, Richter s and reveals himself in front
of and behind the words of the mind searching, teasing, stretching Japanese meta-fantasist Haruki Murakami, now his
ideal front man as long as he sounds like Robert Wyatt, who speaks the words sounding like the end of the world made
sublime, the beginning of time made divine, between down to earth and out of this world.
24 POSTCARDS IN FUL COLOUR
Richters next wonderland, his next set of fleeting images, the next retreat from the tangled, exhausted too much into a
bare room floating in an open-ended space containing nothing but questions and data decay, longing and shadows,
instruments and time, 24 Postcards in Colour, is made up from wondering what happens if ringtones were composed in the
belief they could be beautiful, and more radiant Mozart than tinny Muzak. In this room, Richter looks for the connection
between making an isolated personal artistic statement, and producing something functional music to use in an everyday
practical way that is also spiritual, sweetly imagining a blunt commercial world that actually contains soul and
substance. Melancholy and abbreviated electro-acoustic chamber miniatures fall from the sky, cross the great divide,
fill the room, and then disappear, as if they never existed, from and for and about a chaotic, simulated world thats all
around us, blissful, blistered melodies and memories never quite fully materialising before and after a conversation
that only makes sense if you are in the right place at the right time.
INFRA
Infra, the fourth room for now, in the same building, but separated by oceans of time, is where Richter responds to,
amongst other things, Winterreise, Schuberts masterful, mournful gothic era song cycle based on Wilhelm Muller s bleak
monodramatic poems set in a brutal winter about a questing, misunderstood wanderer whose heart, and memory, is frozen in
grief. It was arranged for a Wayne McGregor ballet inspired by the borrowed fragments of T.S. Eliots The Wasteland, and
its apprehension of chaos, but the Eliot, the Schubert, the Muller, and the dance - and Kafka and Kraftwerk are only
remotely in the room. They re memories, rumours, guiding lights, signals, prompts, pulses, a clustering of ideas and
situations, a motivation for Richter
to work out how to find his own way, how on earth to begin a piece of music, and where to end it, and what it means, the
struggle to make something new from an inherited tradition, once it makes it into the room where we all live, now, in a
world that s not quite sure what to do with itself and its collected, clashing memories.
- Retrospective [4 CD][Limited Edition] by Deutsche Grammophon.