This is, I reckon, the most exciting thing that Richter has put out in years.
I love The Blue Notebooks, which I discovered around its tenth anniversary in 2014. And I was entranced by Sleep the following year. But if you let The Algorithm know that you’ll like him, it’ll keep trying to play you his soundtrack work — and I have to say that, while it’s often very stirring, separated from the movies that I’ve not seen and generally aren’t every like to, it feels kind of meaningless. And then there are the alternative versions of his big hits — and, yes, obviously On The Nature Of Daylight is an absolute banger, but also, there are other tunes, you know.
Anyway, enough grousing, because this record is here to remind me all the reasons that I was so excited by Notebooks back in the day, and plenty more. So, while there are soaring strings and minimalist looping piano lines to be found here, there are also more urgent, edgy atmospheres; and there is guitar on one track, and some rather great wordless vocals, including some Ligeti-ish choral work that is somewhere between atonal chanting and almost moaning; and there are lots of electronics and possibly samples, from a noise at the start which reminds me of the sound you hear accompanying a prenatal ultrasound (which I just had to look up, and turns out to be a Doppler sonification of the movement), to staticky undercurrents, to full-on synth melodies. Take, for example, the way that Data Ballistics segues into A Sweet Air: from an electronically-led buzzing industrial raver to a hummed line that is strangely moving to a delightful minimalist cascading piano line with a little electronic burbling counterpoint. And by the time we get to the final track, Now We Can Sing, well, yes it is uplifting and epic and magnificent, but in a way that feels like we’ve earned it, and it is simply sublime.
I bought this from qobuz.
