Max Richter: Innovative composer on the glories of rave, and the perils of populism
Max Richter has just released Voices 2. Picture: Mike Terry
Max Richter was never much of a raver. But the avant-garde composer’s early career coincided with the explosion in the late 1980s of the underground techno scene, at the time variously heralded as the future of music and harbinger of civilisation’s downfall. And he draws a connection between the soundsystem bangers that so terrified the establishment and his new record, Voices 2, the second of two albums inspired by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
“Rave had the honour being legislated against. Remember the notorious ‘repetitive beats’?” says Richter (55), whose music Crack magazine described as existing “within a kind of Venn diagram space between alternative popular music and the avant-garde”.
He is referring to Britain’s 1994 Criminal Justice Act, which sought to clamp down on unlicensed raves by giving the police the power to stop music “wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats”.
His point is that protest music comes in many guises. One example is Voices 2, Richter’s new suite of compositions meditating on the legacy of the 1948 Universal Declaration and conceived of in collaboration with his partner, filmmaker Yulia Mahr. It’s the latest of his projects to interrogate the modern world: the Kosovo War was a theme of his 2002 debut, Memoryhouse, while the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq received scrutiny in 2004’s The Blue Notebooks.
“The precursors for Voices exists within the protest music tradition,” says Richter, also an A-list soundtrack composer whose credits include HBO’s The Leftovers and the adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend. “It’s in Guthrie and Dylan. You get echoes of it in Beethoven. Or punk and rave.”
Richter may have steered clear of glow-sticks and legally dubious raves in his youth. However, he did intersect directly with 1990s techno via the Future Sound Of London. He collaborated on the group’s 1996 album Dead Cities. That record is about to be reissued on vinyl – an opportunity to revisit the piece Max, built around a ghostly piano refrain by the composer.
“I was very interested in the pure sonic experimentation that was going on,” says Richter of that phase of his life and career. “There was this explosion in technological tools. You could basically make any sound. That was very new and very liberating. People were coming at those tools from academic and classical musical backgrounds. But also from the clubbing world. It was an amazing time.”
There aren’t any repetitive beats on Voices 2. And in contrast to Voices, which featured spoken word readings from the declaration, including an original recording of Eleanor Roosevelt, the new LP is entirely instrumental.
“The first part was about where we’ve got to as a culture,” he says. “The second part is a space to dream into. A space to reflect on the first part. For me, it’s about the potential future.”
“Where we’ve got to” he feels is a dark zone where populism and totalitarianism are on the march. Brexit is the example that springs to mind for Richter. Born in Germany and brought up in Britain, he sees the UK’s departure from the EU is a psychic shock.
“From my standpoint it’s a tragedy, he says. “No matter what the short term gains and losses are, it is fundamentally an anti-civilisation project. It’s just really misguided to increase isolation. This inwards looking mindset is not where we want to be going as a civilisation.”
The rise of populism and the lurch towards extremism were among the factors that motivated Richter to compose Voices. He wanted to remind audiences there is a better away. And that, in world riven with division, the Universal Declaration stands as a monument to empathy.
“I can see the politics in the UK moving towards totalitarian gestures,” he says. “There is this kind of weird sabre-ratting mentality. Of course, it is presented in a way that is completely deniable. The rhetoric is almost a 19th century one. It is incredibly disturbing.”
Richter was born in Lower Saxony but raised in Bedford in the English Midlands to German parents. After a teenage obsession with Kraftwerk inspired him to build his own synthesisers in his bedroom, he went on to study at the Royal Academy of Music in London before going to Florence, where he was taught by modernist composer Luciano Berio.
With hindsight it may seem Richter was destined to become one of the contemporary music’s most acclaimed figures, a navigator of new frontiers and heir to both Philip Glass and Brian Eno. Yet because he worked in that grey area between classic and electronica, initially nobody knew quite what to make of him.
Several prestigious record companies passed on Richter before he found a home with the esoteric label Fat Cat, at various points home to Sigur Rós, No Age and Animal Collective.
“I’d spent years trying to get somewhere within classical music,” he says. “There was just no interest at all. It wasn’t classical enough. It didn’t feel like classical music. It didn’t have the cultural baggage around it that classical music has to have. Equally I sent all my demos around, as everyone does, to all the labels. And, really, no one was interested at all. It wasn’t electronic enough. So Fat Cat were brilliant for me. They had this very experimental, wide-open aesthetic.”
One of the great surprises of his career has been the impact of Sleep. The eight -hour concept record, played on piano, cello, two violas, two violins, organ, soprano vocals, synthesisers and electronics, is described by Richter as a “lullaby….that is meant to be listened to at night ... structured as a large set of variations”.
Sleep has been performed around the world, including at Carlow Arts Festival in 2019. The recital begins late in the evening. Audiences bring along their sleeping bags and settle down for the night as Richter and his ensemble conjure dreamy vibrations.
“Sleep was made as a kind of protest music,” he says. “It coincided basically with 4G in 2015. 4G brought a lot of bandwidth into your pocket. Social media was in your pocket all the time. I wanted to make a piece which would reclaim space from us always being constantly on our screens. It was kind of a protest against always on culture.”
Voices 2 was completed during lockdown. He feels the world will be different when the pandemic ends. And that one of the issues with which music will have to wrestle is the next looming crisis of accelerating climate change.
“There are all sorts of systemic issues in the music business to do with resource use or energy use. Streaming uses a huge amount of energy. And touring has huge climate consequences. These are big operations, hundreds of flights. It’s mad really.
“We really need to find new ways to do everything. There are smarter ways to do most of the things we do. It’s just that we’re all too busy running around to actually do them. That’s maybe one of the benefits of the pandemic, if there are any. This chance to reflect and reset and go, ‘how about we do this differently?’”
Voices 2 is out now
