“When Thomas brought the news that the house I was born in no longer exists – neither the name, nor the park sloping to the river, nothing – I had a dream of return. Multicoloured. Joyous. I was able to fly. And the trees were even higher than in childhood, because they had been growing during all the years since they had been cut down.”
That’s the litany from “The Trees,” off of Richter’s last album, The Blue Notebooks. It’s rare that words and music work so well together to evoke a mood or image. Kafka’s Blue Octavio Notebooks provided the inspiration and framework for an album of somber art-songs that, taken as a whole, formed a beautiful, sepia-toned picture of a winter walk through rows of bare trees.
Richter trades in quiet chamber music (“post-classical,” as he calls it) with small electronic adornments. Sure, lots of folks seem to be doing it these days, but Richter brings a more refined touch to the idiom. He was a founding member of Piano Circus, in which he commissioned works by Steve Reich and Arvo Part,and he collaborated with FSOL on Dead Cities. His experience keeps the music from degenerating into mere window-dressing or wandering off into obscurity. The result is reserved and haunting, but underneath it carries a momentum and grace all its own.
I wasn’t sure to expect with Songs from Before, and on first blush it appears to be a rehash of what made The Blue Notebooks so enjoyable, down to having Robert Wyatt perform readings over some of the tracks.
True, Haruki Murakami’s text evokes a similar mood to the words on the last album, but in this case, the music is more seamlessly tailored to it. Where the spoken-word parts of The Blue Notebooks felt a bit tacked-on, everything meshes well here, as if the music were written with the text in mind.
The music itself is still in the same vein, though many of the pieces here are miniatures, with most clocking in at under two minutes. Despite this, Songs from Before is a much more cohesive whole than the last record, and though nothing approaches the oddness of “Shadow Journal,” “Flowers for Yulia” and the gorgeous “Harmonium” share the same otherworldy pallor.
The electronic treatments have been relegated to the background in favor of a more traditional pallete, and the deviations are more in terms of recording methods, like the detached half-heard “Ionosphere” (Richter sometimes records individual parts to 2″ tape and manipulates the tape itself). There are also subtle tricks being performed with structure, as “Song” opens the record with most of the motivic material cleverly buried within.
Aside from “Yulia,” “Sunlight” is the only track longer than five minutes, a track that hangs in stasis for its first half while the strings resonate in suspension. When the melody enters, it feels a bit forced, as if Richter’s approach is unable to support larger-scale pieces. Still, it’s only a minor mis-step, and hardly unpleasant; it just feels a bit lackluster in comparison.
The record is punctuated by “Autumn Music” twice. The first time, it’s presented as an off-kilter 7/4 waltz for piano and strings, unsteady and unsure of itself. When it returns a few minutes later, it’s found its footing and swoons with an air of yearning and optimism that’s almost heartbreaking.
While the last record strove to be an imaginary soundtrack, this one presents itself as a work in itself, and as such it demands closer attention. The readings are a perfect compliment to the music, and Wyatt’s voice is a good choice. This may not be a life-altering record, but it’s a moving experience, and one worth returning to from time to time.
Songs from Before is available from Fat Cat records.