Retrospective [4 CD][Limited Edition]

• Retrospective [4 CD][Limited Edition] by Deutsche Grammophon.

THE BLUE S On Blue s, Richter turns to Franz Kafkas fragmented Blue Octavo s, a small gnomic book of self-scrutinising thought-experiments, unfinished sentences and passing whims for the overheard words of those shadows, perhaps because he would want Kafka to come up with the term that describes his music - innermost - perhaps because Kafka is his ideal front man - as long as he sounds like Tilda Swinton, with her particular poise and precision, her talent to perceive perhaps because he identifies with how Kafkas words reflect a shaky, tentative, untraceable reality, an inexplicable inner world occasionally illuminated by flashes of startling clarity. SONGS FROM BEFORE On Songs From Before, connected by various odd numbered doors and lonely corridors to s, but in another part of space and time, another part of the brain, surrounded by a high brick wall, Richter s and reveals himself in front of and behind the words of the mind searching, teasing, stretching Japanese meta-fantasist Haruki Murakami, now his ideal front man as long as he sounds like Robert Wyatt, who speaks the words sounding like the end of the world made sublime, the beginning of time made divine, between down to earth and out of this world. 24 POSTCARDS IN FUL COLOUR Richters next wonderland, his next set of fleeting images, the next retreat from the tangled, exhausted too much into a bare room floating in an open-ended space containing nothing but questions and data decay, longing and shadows, instruments and time, 24 Postcards in Colour, is made up from wondering what happens if ringtones were composed in the belief they could be beautiful, and more radiant Mozart than tinny Muzak. In this room, Richter looks for the connection between making an isolated personal artistic statement, and producing something functional music to use in an everyday practical way that is also spiritual, sweetly imagining a blunt commercial world that actually contains soul and substance. Melancholy and abbreviated electro-acoustic chamber miniatures fall from the sky, cross the great divide, fill the room, and then disappear, as if they never existed, from and for and about a chaotic, simulated world thats all around us, blissful, blistered melodies and memories never quite fully materialising before and after a conversation that only makes sense if you are in the right place at the right time. INFRA Infra, the fourth room for now, in the same building, but separated by oceans of time, is where Richter responds to, amongst other things, Winterreise, Schuberts masterful, mournful gothic era song cycle based on Wilhelm Muller s bleak monodramatic poems set in a brutal winter about a questing, misunderstood wanderer whose heart, and memory, is frozen in grief. It was arranged for a Wayne McGregor ballet inspired by the borrowed fragments of T.S. Eliots The Wasteland, and its apprehension of chaos, but the Eliot, the Schubert, the Muller, and the dance - and Kafka and Kraftwerk are only remotely in the room. They re memories, rumours, guiding lights, signals, prompts, pulses, a clustering of ideas and situations, a motivation for Richter to work out how to find his own way, how on earth to begin a piece of music, and where to end it, and what it means, the struggle to make something new from an inherited tradition, once it makes it into the room where we all live, now, in a world that s not quite sure what to do with itself and its collected, clashing memories.