If some far-future digital archaeologist were to excavate the media of our moment, they would find traces of Max Richter. Even if you aren’t one of his 4.8 million monthly Spotify listeners, his neoclassical compositions are inescapable, spanning media from film and television to Dior shows and Krug champagne. His famous piece, “On the Nature of Daylight”, reappears on soundtracks, including Arrival and his Academy Award-nominated score for Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet. Vivaldi composed The Four Seasons, but it’s Richter’s recomposition in Chef’s Table and Bridgerton.
Richter also composes protest albums. His debut, Memoryhouse (2002), drew on the Kosovo conflict. The Blue Notebooks (2004) was a protest in the lead-up to the Iraq War. Exiles (2021) highlighted displaced people and Voices (2020) is interwoven with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Even the eight-and-a-half-hour experimental epic, Sleep (2015), was a reaction to digital disruption. Richter’s compositions are in conversation with the world, his minimalism both form and function – speaking clearly to be understood.
He pushes what music can say without words in his new album, While the Flood Rages, which explores a sonic landscape of ecological and technological destruction. The album is adapted from Richter’s score for the ballet MADDADDAM, his third collaboration with choreographer Wayne McGregor. This co-production of the National Ballet of Canada and the Royal Ballet is based on Margaret Atwood’s climate fiction trilogy. The timing was eerie: development of this post-pandemic eco-dystopia ballet was delayed by Covid and concurrent with the global rise of the Extinction Rebellion movement.
Although earnest about his subject matter – even his arts production space, Studio Richter Mahr, is a low-impact, eco-minded former alpaca farm – Richter has taken a lighter approach to marketing the apocalypse. While the Flood Rages is accompanied by listening events in New York, London, Paris, Seoul, Tokyo and Berlin, alongside a crossword book on his official fan site, with clues released weekly: 1 Across: “Artistic rebirth or flourishing”. Renaissance.
Richter’s three-act score isn’t a faithful adaptation of Atwood’s novels, but the track names suggest associations. “Their Eerie Music” is the song of the Crakers, bioengineered hominids of “mad scientist” Crake. The title track, “While the Flood Rages”, refers to the spread of Crake’s man-made plague, the Dry Flood. “Oh Let Me Be Not Proud” and “My Body Is My Earthly Ark” allude to the hymn book of the God’s Gardeners eco-cult.
Climate discourse must be furiously earnest in any language. Richter believes music can convey us to a better world. Hopefully he’s right.
As much as Atwood resisted the sci-fi label, if it looks like a Craker and sings like a Craker, we call it a Craker. Richter applies the genre’s penchant for pastiche and referential echoes to his sonic worldbuilding. Tracks bleed together and call back, demanding a sequential listen-through.
Richter reworks the first track from Memoryhouse, “After Europe, the Rain”, to establish a richly referential musical story. In “Wave After Wave”, the gentle rain of the original becomes an electronic pulse, static waves encroaching and retreating, the piano melody taken up by strings instead. Violins quiver mournfully over swaying bass and cello. Brass and percussion push into a cinematic finale. We begin with the end of the world.
For a composer who cites Bach’s Double Violin Concerto and Kraftwerk as early musical influences, the dominance of strings and electronics feels personal. “Their Eerie Music” leads a tremulous violin call and cello response into distorted buzzing, the old staccato of a mobile signal caught in speakers, and a doorbell “ding” like a sudden memory. “While the Flood Rages” flashes back to the pandemic. Here the momentum of piano is a weary, inevitable waltz carrying the yearning strings.
Richter’s work shows real narrative energy as “The City was a Chaos” shifts tone. Glitching electronics oscillate side to side. Percussive synth sets a weird, syncopated pulse. Over its five minutes it develops a John Carpenter-esque sonic journey, jumping between ominous tension and untrustworthy calm, haunted by a thrumming bassline. In one moment, slashes of cello like chunky guitar riffs join the stabbing horns and strings of a horror score, while the next offers a sanctuary of glimmering notes.
“Sensorium” reveals human traces, an eerie, undulating hum by the Tenebrae choir with static Geiger counter-like clicks hinting at an irradiated world, before we reach “Quiet”. The conclusion of the first act is signalled by a four-note falling piano line that’s repeated in the finale of the album’s three parts.
Earth and industry collide in the second act. Field recordings of bees are a sonic signifier for tenuous ecological stability, the organic static of the swarm fading as a delicately plucked string melody slips into “Tell the Bees”. This folk revival curiosity is a pastoral idyll tinged with nostalgia, where fey woodwind and a harpsichord-like twinkle trail into a drone and shimmering, alien synth. This is a false lull: a solitary bee returns as a looped beat for the heart-pounding “Data Ballistics”. In an industrial techno assault worthy of hard raves, Richter incorporates bursts of recorded gunfire into a textural flurry with a growling bassline and a synth emergency siren. It lurches in unpredictable pursuit and evasion to a climax of narrative violence.
In “Oh Let Me Be Not Proud”, a hopeful choral hum beneath the rise-and-fall of electronics, distorted voices call over transmissions with glimmering beeps like the tones of dial-up internet connection or a disconnected phone, our archaic instruments. Telco chimes drift into “A Sweet Air”, ending the act with the now-familiar refrain.
The third act is rebirth. Discordant choral waves of “Amniotic” blend into a muffled soundscape, like music heard in the womb. “Dawn” awakens from static with birdsong strings, a rise-and-shine triangle and the clear call of woodwind. This heroic note in the denouement is a brief return to tradition.
It’s unfair to compare any works with “On the Nature of Daylight”: it’s unreasonable to demand transcendence too often. But perhaps a glimmer of its spirit is caught in “Background Radiation”. Over glitchy electronic flutters, solitary angelic voices wind and duck in a seabird dance reminiscent of Thomas Tallis’s “Spem in Alium”. Deep, bittersweet strings blend into a sustained, organ-like drone that entwines major sonic threads of the album. Fragmentary human survivals are background radiation, lingering in the song of the new world.
Richter finishes neatly, elegantly, with the ordered hymnal hums and audible breath of “My Body Is My Earthly Ark”, before gently probing strings creep back for “Now We Can Sing” and that falling line. We are still here. The grief of a solitary violin is buoyed on an orchestral tide, gathering towards a brassy crescendo, before sighing back to the swooping choral voices and a triumphant chord.
While the Flood Rages begins with the finale and ends with an optimistic beginning. I feel strangely embarrassed by its earnestness, but hope always seems saccharine when you feel cynical. Climate discourse must be furiously earnest in any language. Richter believes music can convey us to a better world. Hopefully he’s right.