After Songs from Before and The Blue Notebooks, DG is releasing the third in a row of Max Richter’s Retrospective catalogue – Infra! Scored for piano, electronics, and string quartet, Infra is an expansion of a 25-minute piece Richter wrote for a collaboration with choreographer Wayne McGregor and visual artist Julian Opie The original ballet was a response to the London bombings on 7/7. Richter explains:, “The piece is about traveling, and in a way, [the songs] are quite existential, a meditation on the political state of London at that time and the tragedy of those events. We all knew people who had been affected by it or killed. Music is a social activity, and by definition, making any kind of statement is a political act.” With Infra Max Richter also responded to, amongst other things, Winterreise, Schubert’s 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 Additionally, Richter drew inspiration from borrowed fragments of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, and it’s apprehension of chaos. However 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.