24 Postcards In Full Colour

We Say...

Review by John Schaefer

The ringtone is a medium poorly suited to classical music. Enter Max Richter, the German composer/keyboardist who's spend much of his career in the UK — first in London in the '90s as part of the six-piano new-music band called Piano Circus, then in Edinburgh in the '00s as a producer and composer. (Where he produced, among other things, the Scottish shoegaze band the Twilight Sad.) Richter has already released three albums of singular, affecting music for keyboards, strings, occasional laptop effects and voices. But 24 Postcards is something different. This collection of miniatures, either one or two minutes long, was intended to be released solely as digital downloads for cell phones. But that plan caused a hue and cry among Richter's fans (and, I'm sure, his record label), and so here the pieces are, to use however you like.

Because they are so short, each piece is a distilled musical moment, evoking a place or a character on a journey. They continue Richter's exploration of classical music with laptops and post-rock electronics, and vary from the acoustic piano of "H in New England," which combines elements of impressionism and minimalism, to the processed and found sounds of "In Louisville At 7," a winning piece in a seven-beat rhythm written as a tribute to Louisville's post-rock-founding band called Rachel's. "A Sudden Manhattan of the Mind" pits a lyrical violin melody against glitchy electronics — the same violin melody returns, unaccompanied, in "Cathodes." Inevitably, some of these works seem to end too soon, just as you're getting sucked into Richter's sound world, but overall, "24 Postcards" offers a musical journey worth taking.