How can an artist remain grounded in the present moment despite a world constantly grappling with the barrages of political fury, environmental crises, a ravenous consumption of content and the nonsense-economy it generates? Let’s not forget that we are still in a period of recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic, and the resulting hurly-burly of uncertainty and anxiety is a pandemic in its own right. The idea of slowing down, finding the eye of this hurricane, and living in the now feels like something that belongs in the fantasy aisle of your local bookstore (one that’s about to go out of business because no one’s reading). Somewhere amidst this chaos, there is the quiet power of a pulsating sound that’s always been there, calling us to stillness. It is the gentle tap of the mundane. It is the sound of the quotidian, of the neighbour’s cars starting with reluctance, birds chirping through their tree-top gossip, of mediocre coffee being brewed, the slightly-wobbly wheels of rolling suitcases headed for the airport. This is the sonic landscape in which our lives are rooted and, like waves walloping against a shoreline, generates a rhythm that’s inherently, inexplicably, therapeutic. It is within this deep rhythmic well that composer and pianist Max Richter has found the makings of his ninth studio album, In a Landscape.

With a successful career across various mediums, Richter’s output has always explored the friction between a cohesive humanity and an intractably fragmented world. The accumulation of his accolades resemble a mountainous landscape of mostly peaks, from creating one of the most celebrated classical works in the 21st Century with The Blue Notebooks in 2004, to surpassing one billion streams as of 2019. There are many lovers of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons who’ve eloped with Richter’s re-composition since it came out in August of 2012. His compositions have laid the sonic carpet for some of the most acclaimed films (Lore, The Patience Stone) and TV shows (The Handmaid’s Tale, The Last of Us), showcasing his range of musical storytelling fit for commercial and art house box offices alike. In a Landscape is the 2024 addition to Richter’s sprawling catalogue, an album that parades Richter’s infatuation with that indelible concoction of the mundane and the minimalistic.

Mapped out across 19 tracks, In A Landscape glides on the tectonic plates of melodic interludes and the tuneless snippets of sounds cultivated from daily life - all labelled “life studies”, a total of nine are interspersed along the album’s 76 minutes. From footsteps in the woods and the rustle of distant conversations, to the gentle murmur of a piano playing in the next room, Richter goes spelunking through the soundtrack of our daily lives to find a soothing narrative. Rather than instigating images of serene imagined landscapes, these life studies draw the listener back into the rugged pantry of their own surroundings. It seems to offer—on the minimalistic platter which Richter has been polishing across his decades-long career—a small pause, a respite from the psychic and physical grind.

Richter, however, doesn’t quite practise what he’s preaching with In A Landscape─that he’s setting the mundane to music doesn’t mean his music has become mundane. The shadows cast by the work-a-day scenes explored in this album are set against an epic backdrop of his influences: poets who laboured over the threat of materialism, or the intrigues of love and despair. The silage of the likes of Anne Carson, Wordsworth, Keats wafts through the titles and thematic materials of the album. Hence Richter’s description of In a Landscape as a “reconciling of polarities.” Here, his musical instinct is to slow down in a world that insists on acceleration. Here, the arithmetic and repetitive styles of Phillip Glass and Terry Riley are combined with the expressive baroque flora of Bach and Purcell. As if to resolve, a priori, any speculation regarding where he himself stands between within tug-o-war of polarities, Richter borrows the album’s title from John Cage’s 1948 composition─a seminal study in meditative minimalism.

Yet another evidence of Richter’s mission to reconcile polar opposites can be found in his creative process which mixes the tactility of notating the score by hand and recording the album at a state-of-the-art studio. That being Studio Richter Mahr, a rustic English retreat in Oxfordshire with an ethos of environmentalism, sustainability, and localism. The “studio”—run in collaboration with Richter’s wife, Yulia Mahr—functions more like a multi-purpose creative laboratory with a constant stream of resident and visiting artists. Deciphering whether the studio is the architectural realisation of In A Landscape, or the album is merely the musical distillation of this creative hub’s daily operation, is a task akin to a hound hunting its own tail. Either way, the real feat of In A Landscape is the sincerity of the compositional gesture. A gesture unencumbered by the composer’s own illustrious accolades and the hi-tech environment that produced this album. A gesture that seeks to hold the listener in place, to sit in stillness. A stillness that brings to mind the closing lines a Derek Walcott poem, “Love After Love”:

Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,

peel your own image from the mirror.

Sit. Feast on your life.

Get your exclusive Colour 2LP Edition of In A Landscape (with Signed Art Card)