Customer Reviews

24 Postcards in Full Colour

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Writing about such music is difficult. Especially when its beauty is escorted by concept. I could tell you about Touch Ringtones, and Max Richter's approach at creating twenty four miniature classical sketches designed to capture the moment and snap you in and out of your daily tasks. I could tell you about Richter's gallery installations where the pieces would be transmitted to the audiences mobile phones via SMS. I could tell you about the twenty four photographic images beautifully laid out on a CD insert (some revealing a reflection or a shadow of Max Richter himself), and on a mini website with a preview of the tracks. I could, perhaps, quote the German-born, modern classical composer, who explains the idea behind his fourth album in his own words: "thinking about how we listen to music now, with the range of options available, I wondered why it is that the ringtone medium has so far been treated as unfit for creative music..." But I won't do any of that. Instead, I simply invite you to listen and decide for yourself... Richter may have an impact on your perception of the intrusive personal wake up call of a gadget humanity should probably live without. I often picture Mozart slapping his forehead at the thought that his genius is echoed through a tiny speaker on a busy subway. Perhaps one day, on my morning commute, I will be disturbed by the alarming calm of Max Richter's peaceful piano playing through someone's Nextel. Perhaps... I doubt it... Until then, I highly recommend an excellent pair of headphones to enjoy this absolutely marvelous collection of sketches whose shortcoming is only their brief existence. Each track ranges between one minute and two, offering you only a short glimpse into a moment conveyed through geographically centered track names, personal photographic snapshots, and of course music itself. The instrumentation for the album is limited by Richter himself to a string quintet, acoustic guitar, and of course, a piano. The seasoning for this recipe includes dusty vinyl, fuzzy shortwave radio, and clicky scratchy samples, all processed by transistors and 16 track 2" tape. The pieces are designed to be a cluster of fragmented impressionistic vignettes, "stitched together to form a series of jump-cuts and foldbacks in time." Richter elaborates further: "because the piece is a collection of tones, where I have no control of the order, I made a structure that holds together by use of shared material - like a cloud of pieces, or a handful of confetti, or a constellation of fragments - to be navigated as you like..." 24 Postcards In Full Colour is released on Brighton Based FatCat Records imprint, 130701, dedicated to more instrumental albums. I highly recommend you also pickup (or revisit) Richter's previous hailed modern classical masterpieces, Memoryhouse, The Blue Notebooks, and Songs From before.

Richter has now a substantial body of solo work, not due to volume so much as due to extreme refinement and a rather well-sorted and distinctive lexicon. Set against his earlier, longer- to average-length pieces comprising The Blue Notebooks and Songs from Before, 24 Postcards finds Richter updating the form of "miniatures" - short, evocative sketches which in this case seem intent on coalescing as an integrated suite. Here his chamber-like ensemble sets aside the use of narrative voices (those of Tilda Swindon and Robert Wyatt, respectively) for a purely instrumental line-up comprised of piano, violins, viola, cellos, drums and guitars. Rarely will all instruments be heard simultaneously. Instead, the greater sense of the ensemble is effectively disassembled across the 24 concise pieces, encouraging subtle timbral relationships that drive moments of profoundly beautiful contrast and constancy. Pieces feature everything from the simple and expressive phrases of a solo violin, reverberant above grainy, arid drones, to the dense interactions of muted guitars, percussion and cellos. The overall mood is glimmering melancholia, the playing mostly soto voce, made profound by shifts between highly focused, solo phrasing and dense, textural expanses that all exhibit a compact, well-defined instrumental hierarchy. There's something brilliantly counter-intuitive in accomplishing this work as short segments, rather than as a segmented whole: and the impression made is much more than such an insufficient and purely semantic acknowledgement. The music goes on to accomplish something of an incredibly dissociative unity.

Fans of Max Richter should enjoy this collection of shorter pieces. Varied but still distinctively Richter. Moody, sumptuous and captivating.

This will take you some places that many recording don't. A nice mix of ambient feel and well conceived composition. My only complaint is that my favorite pieces are too short and I have had to loop them on my recording software to make them longer.

The idea of making miniatures pieces is interesting and good. But to me the length of the CD is a bit short -under 34 minutes. There is a mixture of pieces, some with piano, some strings, some guitar and others an electronic mix. But there are very few pieces mixing the different instruments and electronics. The recording is excellent, the sound of the piano is very delicate. The harmony in the pieces is very repetitive, which corresponds to a minimalist style. But the general composition of the pieces are lacking tension, drama, emotion. Listening to the music becomes very quickly boring. Tracks 6 and 15 seem very similar to Philips Glass's sound track from the Hours -which I highly recommend I you are looking for some excellent modern compositions for strings and piano. Track 10 also has reminiscences of Biosphere's Shenzhou, where he quotes passages from Debussy orchestral works in a very soft ambient mix. I also highly recommend all of Geir Jessen's (Biosphere) works. Max Richter's 24 Postcards in full colour could have been an excellent concept turns out rather dull. I do not recommend this CD.