:: Track Listing

1. Song
2. Flowers For Yulia
3. Fragment
4. Harmonium
5. Ionosphere
6. Autumn Music 1
7. Time Passing
8. Sunlight
9. Lullaby
10. Autumn Music 2
11. Verses
12. From the Rue Vilin

:: Record Review

Max Richter

Songs From Before
(Fat Cat; 2006)

Rating: 65%


The first thing that assaults is a deep horny bass. No, it’s not an assault, but a hard blue jive as long as it sinks -- a bass that can only give birth to nothing. That’s opener “Song,” and what a waste of placenta, following dearth like that just to disappear. Groan and wink out. And thematically, Richter’s sewn himself a suit of armor, because he’s a “Post-Classicist” and because his album’s a somber, languorous meditation on memories and the fading of memories and the insatiable longing to bridge whatever gap that makes. The album feels light and he knows this, but he’s defended because he’s got deep horny bass -- only really perceived on the sweetest of intentions -- and he’s got symbols and texts and static to swallow whatever’s left. So, even when violins crow in perfectly toned triads, slipping away or jumping the mist a half step out of sync with the carefully honed white noise, and it all seems so tenaciously sad, the simplicity is justified. Even when, in “Flowers For Yulia,” a detuned radio, clipped with part-words, grows so thickly that a sheet of violins can only emulsify and then, later, slowly scramble for melody, the pretension is never really alienating nor very exciting. Songs From Before is light and it’s solemn, and the two make for an obvious listen.

Like Tilda Swinton and Kafka before, Max Richter’s found a solid fit/muse in the combined condiments of Robert Wyatt and Haruki Murakami. Wyatt seems to speak like an oaf, stumbling through some sort of inimitable cockney, but with Murakami’s texts, he displays a subtle lilt in his tongue and ends up adding an oneiric rhythm to the most mundane points of the album. The passages are paltry at best, scattershot from Murakami’s work, carrying little by way of plot, but the conceit behind their inclusion is neon: Murakami is a rigorous minimalist, sabotaging his own droll minutiae with fits of transcendence and absurdity, but for an album concerned with quotidian implications and the borders of consciousness, Murakami’s a master of creating a lucid mesh of the common and the unbelievable. During “Verses” Wyatt reads a paragraph from Sputnik Sweetheart and intones the main character’s knowledge of his own inability to ever actually be with the girl he loves, to ever satisfy a basic human lust. It’s an infuriating passage; what is beautiful in this world will only escape, leaving behind contrails to grope at and lagging noise to yell over; as it is with all things, Richter seems to say, as it is with memories and with every experience, and even with music. The “Post-Classicist” strips down hundreds of years of theory and composition into a wisp of strings, a bed of synth, a sprite of keys, and a lumbering, jiving pit of bass.

So Songs From Before castigates itself into a sallow, damp corner. Its must wreathes into an audible din, defining intractable notions of time with an insistence in repetition, in suite structure, and in the almighty connotation of “Before.” Tonally, Richter’s a poet, eschewing orchestration or gradations of melodiousness for restraint, and then eschewing restraint for something even more empirical. The bottom line is something like “Time Passing,” wherein a celestial dirge bleats, surrounded by the dressings of “Autumn Music,” which layers piano, violins, and volume in the heartwrenchingest of modes. The effect is inertial, but still stagnant, because all cinematic breadth is wiped out on nostalgia. If, like “Sunshine,” tension is manifest in slight swathes of violin or in a delicate deconstruction of chord, the title of the song itself becomes metonymy for whatever emotion should be felt. Should the “Autumns” sound like, now, the dissolution of the season? Should they be only evocative outside of Autumn itself? Nostalgia’s a tricky beast, and even though Songs From Before can find gorgeousness in the lightest of touches, nostalgia can only flow one way. Since the album’s too self-serious to settle into kitsch, obsolescence is what’s next. Dom Sinacola :: 9 December 2006 |