In January, the German-born composer Max Richter completed a task that had long felt like a dream: He heard the music of Memoryhouse, his first album under his own name, played in front of an audience in a proper auditorium. What’s more, the show in London’s large Barbican Hall was not only sold out but an event important enough to necessitate the second vinyl reissue of the album. Since its release in 2002, Memoryhouse has become a landmark of the amorphous scene that would eventually earn the tags “post-classical” or “indie classical.” Memoryhouse remains audacious but careful, intimate but vivid, innovative but reverent. In 2002, Richter’s ability to weave subtle electronics against the grand BBC Philharmonic Orchestra helped suggest new possibilities and locate fresh audiences that composers such as Nico Muhly and Michał Jacaszek have since pursued. As you listen to new work by Julianna Barwick or Jóhann Jóhannson, thank Richter; just as Sigur Rós did with its widescreen rock, Richter showed that crossover wasn’t necessarily an artistic curse. Nearly a dozen years later, the material finally got its due.
When Richter began composing what became Memoryhouse in the late 90s, he had no idea if any ensemble would ever record the work, let alone play it live: “I just wrote the work for my own peace of mind—to just get it out of my system,” he recounted earlier this year. “This was my first time recording my ‘real’ music with an orchestra... It seemed like a crazy thing to happen.” In many ways, this is simply the sound to which his three decades of life had directed him. He’d written music as early as a pre-teen, then fallen for Kratfwerk and the Beatles. He’d considered becoming a poet by trade. Eventually, Richter rigorously studied music, training as a classical pianist and composer and working under the auspices of experimental innovator Luciano Berio. Richter went on to help form the minimalist-focused group Piano Circus and, during their popular mid-90s run, collaborated closely with the electronic duo the Future Sound of London. Funded by a short-lived record label wing of the wonderfully eclectic BBC3 show Late Junction, Memoryhouse arrived as the post-modern nexus of it all—the piano and the strings, the bass and the static, the poems and the samples, set against a rather solemn view of worldwide political struggle.
A few relatively straightforward pieces for strings and sometimes horns help anchor Memoryhouse. For instance, “Last Days” works as a symphonic crescendo, with incisive strings providing the tension against a march of low brass and concert percussion. The piano sonata “Andras” presses into an unseen ceiling, a melody growing only so loud and busy before quieting down again and again. But much of Memoryhouse threads those standard maneuvers against risky production choices and rather unexpected textures. “Garden (1973)/Interior” builds a glorious drone behind the voice of John Cage reading his poems; eventually, the long tone yields to a sobbing violin line that winds through a harpsichord lace. And during the brazen “Untitled (Figures)", Richter accents a beat that might’ve been lifted from Aphex Twin with twinkling bells and sighing strings. “Laika’s Journey” takes the sonic structure of an orchestra and inverts it, string-based splendor becoming the basis of notes that fade in and out like ghostlights.
Some of the gambles are subtler. Above field recordings and a reading from political refugee and poet Edmond Jabès, opener “Europe, After the Rain” plays a disappearing game with its piano and string sections. Each separate element sometimes sounds as though it were being transmitted through a radio or piped in from the next room. Richter is undermining the orchestra he never thought he’d have. “Landscape with Figure (1922)” initially moves with the drama and grace of Arvo Pärt’s Tabula Rasa, but Richter fights the impulse to stay polite. By piece’s end, the (acoustic) bass seems swollen enough to accompany Sunn O))), the higher notes piercing and loud enough to galvanize most any post-rock climax. But it's the remarkable “Lines on a Page (One Hundred) Violins” that does it all: Richter crafts a wonderful moment of chamber ensemble beauty, then pits it against a background noise of spoken word signals and the kind of blissful electroacoustic haze Fennesz helped make famous. The track only lasts 83 seconds, but it’s a revelation of the possibilities that Richter would continue to explore on the more restrained and more thoroughly realized follow-up, 2004’s The Blue Notebooks. Memoryhouse was an essential starting point, not the peak of Richter’s aesthetic. That was yet to come.
Richter often talks about art as a sort of personal synthesis, where all the inspirations, influences and experiences of his life funnel into a particular project. That’s especially true for Memoryhouse, an album that took only two years to write but took most of his life to ponder. And the composer, now 46, first fell in love with recorded music not through shiny discs or tiny files but through slabs of vinyl. “Our sense of what is beautiful in music is always shaped by what we listened to as a kid, and when I think of great music, I think of vinyl music,” he said in an interview not long before the Barbican performance. “The Beatles, the Beach Boys—they are an anchor to how I think, and they were made on tape, for vinyl.”
Apart from mere coronation of that January show, Richter’s preference is perhaps the best explanation for this latest reissue of Memoryhouse. Fat Cat imprint 130701 offered the album on both CD and LP when it initially re-released Memoryhouse in 2009, but this version puts the content on two white LPs, with a gatefold cover and additional art. If that sounds like a slim update of such an important album on such an auspicious date, it is. Richter tends to discuss music as a conversation between composer, subject and audience, but this feels a little like a monologue. Perhaps a set of essays that gets to the heart of why Memoryhouse mattered then and now, or even a batch of the musical sketches that led to these meticulous 65 minutes, could provide that sort of communicative context. Richter, after all, has never been shy about what this set meant to his career or for the subsequent rise of a particular “indie classical” cadre with which he’s often associated.
Still, hearing Memoryhouse again through any avenue for the first time in years provides a jolting reminder of just how much classical music has broken outside of its shell and into other realms during the last decade. Lost in the Trees, a band writing Baroque-influence song cycles about childhood trauma, can thrive on the rock label ANTI- alongside Tom Waits and Neko Case. Rock musicians like Bryce Dessner, Jonny Greenwood and Glenn Kotche can get legitimate attention and substantive interpretations of their classical sidelines with groups like So Percussion, yMusic and Kronos Quartet. The Ecstatic Music Festival can thrive to the point it reaches Carnegie Hall and launches marquee premieres of major works. And in London, Max Richter can hear Memoryhouse live for the first time, played by the orchestra that recorded it, in a very sold-out Barbican.
