I've been trying to stop buying so many of Max Richter's soundtracks, not because they're not nice - they almost always are - but more because he releases them at such a pace I can't keep up (not just in effort, but also financially). However, this one was an immediate purchase.
Max Richter provided the soundtrack to the first episode of the third season of Black Mirror, a show I'd been watching from the start (having been a fan of Charlie Brooker's work for many years). The third series saw the show move from Channel 4 to Netflix, and with that came a huge increase in production values, and that first episode, Nosedive, was possibly the peak of that - Bryce Dallas Howard as the lead and Max Richter providing the soundtrack. If anything, I think the effect of all that gloss was a huge part of the plot - the shiny, perfect, Instagram-styled existence at the start had to be so, such that the fall the story brought felt even more dramatic. It was a great episode, and the soundtrack definitely added to that. I remember hoping it'd get pressed on vinyl, because I really enjoyed the pieces as the time.
In fact, I think it remains the only Max Richter soundtrack I own where I've actually seen the film it was written for, although that should be seen as more a reflection of how much television I get the time to watch these days (very little), which was another reason to buy it. As with a lot of soundtracks, there are few things you could call "songs" - over the 25-minutes, there's the 7-minute opener On Reflection which sets the scene at the start perfectly, the 4-minute The Journey, Not the Destination relying on some fast-paced electronics to soundtrack the demise, and the 5-minute The Consolation of Philosophy echoing the opener in a reflective way. The other four pieces are around the 2-minute mark and, whilst vital to feel of the episode, not very exciting as an album. But those three main pieces are all excellent, and not only do they provide a great example of what Max Richter does so well (merge classical music with electronics in very emotive ways), they also soundtrack the story arc brilliantly. If the three ran consecutively as one song, you could draw easy parallels between the structure of the song to early-Mogwai or Godspeed songs; I think that's the appeal of Max Richter's music to me - it's basically post-rock but played on entirely different instruments.
A strange note to end on, but I was very surprised when Max Richter's soundtrack to Nosedive wasn't the musical highlight of the series, however I'll save that for another time.
Format: 12", picture sleeve
Tracks: 7
Cost: £17 new
Bought: Bear Tree Records website
When: 09/04/18
Colour: Black
Etching: None
mp3s: Download code
