Tetragrammaton with Rick Rubin - Episode 200: Max Richter

Episode Date: September 9, 2026

Max Richter is a composer, pianist, and producer. His albums include Memoryhouse, The Blue Notebooks, and Sleep. His instrumental composition “On the Nature of Daylight” has been featured in films including Shutter Island and Arrival, which he also scored. By combining orchestral writing with electronic and ambient music, his work spans ballet, television, and film, including Mary, Queen of Scots and Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet. Works mentioned:  Memoryhouse The Blue Notebooks In A Landscape ------ Thank you to the sponsors that fuel our podcast and our team: Anthropic ⁠https://Claude.com/tetra⁠ ------ AGZ ⁠https://DrinkAG1.com/tetra⁠ ------ Squarespace ⁠https://Squarespace.com/tetra⁠ Use code 'TETRA' ------ Athletic Nicotine ⁠https://www.AthleticNicotine.com/tetra⁠ Use code 'TETRA' ------ Lectio 365 ⁠https://Lectio365.com⁠ ------ Sign up to receive Tetragrammaton Transmissions ⁠https://www.tetragrammaton.com/join-newsletter

JZ in 8. Streaming next weekend on HBO in North America and on Mooby, everywhere else. Tetragrammaton. I feel like composers have always been looking for new ways to tell stories, like new colors for the palette. So all through the 18th and 19th centuries, you know, the orchestra gets bigger because they invent new instruments,

the brass section gets bigger, the winds get bigger, more strings. The piano keyboard gets longer, the longer Beethoven lives. You know, he wants more. Bach was, I mean, a pioneer of so many things. And, I mean, if you look at his organ music, his organ music is all about, like, new colours and enlarging, like, the emotional potential of the instrument.

It's also, like, heavy metal. Like, every Bach organ piece, doesn't matter what key it's in, has got a bottom C in it, because that's like the biggest sound in the organ. And you can feel it in the writing. You know, it's a lot about sensation, actually, kind of physical sensation. Obviously, it's amazingly put together

and the counterpoint's incredible on everything, but it's also about, like, physical impact. How different was organ music pre-Bock? A bit different. I mean, you've got sort of books to Hu da and people like that, and sort of slightly earlier. But I think what's amazing about, Bach is that he sort of puts it all together.

You know, he sorts out all the tuning systems so we can play in like all 12 keys properly. He organizes all of these disparate kind of materials which are around kind of before him. Yeah, he's extraordinary. Did you always approach music with an open palette? Yeah, you know, I mean, I think we become musicians because we fall in love with music, right?

That's why. And you don't fall in love with, like, one thing. You fall in love with, like, the whole thing. in love with like the whole, the whole thing. So for me, I always felt like, you know, the differentiation between like pop music and classical music or electronic music, classical me, I just felt like those separations were not real. They were just imaginary constructs, you know, because people aren't like that. People aren't in boxes, you know, we're a spectrum. We're a sort of continuity across our affections.

our enthusiasms, things we love, things we don't love. I kind of always thought, yeah, this seems weird to me, this idea that, you know, thou shalt not use, you know, whatever that instrument. And so, you know, when I was a kid, I was interested, in classical music, you know, that was, in a way, going back to when I was three, you know, I fell in love. I had a kind of a lightning bolt moment.

But at the same time, I was always listening to what was going on in pop music as well. Classical music has been a thread from the beginning for you? Yes, I have a few memories from when we still lived in Germany. So that was before I was, well, probably I was in my third year. My parents weren't musicians, but they had a few records, you know. And hearing this record of the Bach double violin concert, that kind of fused with the sensation of sunlight sort of falling in through the window.

And hearing this amazing melodies, and having this intuition that the melodies were amazing, but there was like a governing principle, there was like a grammar, which was making them affect me the way they did. And I became like passionately interested in discovering what that was. You know, what is that secret code

that makes these sounds add up to something more? Yeah, that was it for me, really. You can play two simple phrases and one, if you never heard it again, you wouldn't think twice. And another one sticks in your head and creates some sense of emotion in the body. Yeah. How does that work?

Well, it's a mystery, right? I mean, it's funny, you know, because at various points, you know, especially like when you're younger, you think I understand this music thing. You know, I've got it. I know what I know what's going on. But actually, you know, I've been doing this for decades now and it becomes more mysterious all the time. You know, I know how many encounters.

work. I know how things work, but there's something really magical and spontaneous in the way a piece of music can affect you. Something will speak to you one day in a way which it hasn't before. Are there any unbreakable rules in music? No, I don't think so. I don't think so. You're free. Yeah, I think music is, I mean, it is a boundless space, right? And it's a space where every sort of human thing can be talked about and expressed. I think Patty Smith says this, doesn't she, it's a music space where you can proceed with abandon. You know, you can just follow it. That's often a sensation I have when I'm working on something, that there is this sort of, it opens up its own space as it develops, you know, and you sort of discover this whole other thing, this kind of territory.

So you might have a starting point and then be surprised by what happens next? Totally. I think it's like novelists say this, don't they, of their characters. They'll be writing a story with a certain bunch of characters, and they think they know what those characters are going to do, but they actually start doing something else, and it's like, okay. Are you always writing? Yeah. Is there always a purpose to the writing, or is it just I'm writing music? No, I do a lot of things where there's a, if you like, a commission, you know, like a ballet or a orchestral piece or a movie. You know, these are things where somebody has asked you something and then you've engaged. in a kind of a process and a dialogue with them and that, yeah, that's sort of directed towards something. There's the other thing I do which is making my own records, which are just wide open.

You discover it as you go, right? You discover what it wants to be. And there's like this whole other bit of writing, I guess, where I've started something, I've intended something, and it's sort of turned into something else, and it's like, okay, so that's not for this. But then it goes on to this sort of, compost heap of ideas, which...

You collect those. Yeah, which are like, oh, what's that? And those are kind of interesting to re-encounter. Have you ever re-engage with an older piece and found a new way to go into it? All the time. Yeah, all the time. I think they're great because you come at them with kind of objectivity. Because a lot of the time, I kind of, you know, I pick something up from years ago and it's like, well, I don't even know what that is.

But it's like, oh, there's something, you know, there's something I could sort of dig into here. Is there every time where you'll pick up something from the past and not know what it is, but that's not a bad thing? It's actually a good thing, yeah. I think that's great because it gives you a kind of editorial, like it gives you a little bit of objectivity, which, because, you know, we love what we make, right? So it's like, oh, I, you know, I love this thing, even though it's not working, I still love it. But actually, it's quite good to sort of have a bit of distance. Typically, how will something start for you?

I mean, if it's a commission, then it's a commission. You know, please write me this movie's good. of whatever. With other projects, you know, if it's a suggestion that I write, you know, say an orchestral piece, then I just have to ask myself the questions about, you know, whether I've got the idea for that right now or is it a space I'm excited by?

And then there are often ideas from literature. I read a lot. Reading is my other thing, really, poetry literature. And, you know, two or three words might just, kind of jump out at you from something. And then you think, oh, okay, so this is an idea, this is a feeling I'd love to, you know, investigate, spend time with, that kind of thing. Do you ever have an idea for something beautiful that really changes the thing that you were

given? Yeah, that happens a lot. At that point, you have to have a kind of an open dialogue with, you know, whoever's supposed to be playing it or conducting it. Is this part of this piece, or is this actually something else? I really think nothing is ever wasted. Everything is just, you know, it's got its little... Waiting for the right moment.

Right, exactly, yeah. When working with electronics, does it always start with electronics, or might you take an analog instrument and subvert it with electronics? Yeah, it's both of those things. I mean, when I first started making my own work, it came out of, in a sense, me viewing like traditional instrumentation and electronics in the studio as like one thing. I tried to sort of make that argument to, you know, orchestras, record labels, blah, la, la. And basically no one bought that idea. I made Memory House, which is 2002 or something.

It was really a sort of, well, no one's going to play this or commission it or believe in it, so I have to just do this. It treats the orchestra and the electronics in the orchestra and the studio as like one instrument. At the time, there were these, you know, it had to be either this or this or this. It feels like it birthed a whole new type of music. You're not the only person who does this now. Right. This is true. Even though Memory House was like on commercial terms, I mean, it was a disaster area, you know, I mean, we didn't even get to play it live for 10 years. Wow, right? There was no context for that record to exist. And obviously, basically, hardly anyone bought it except other museums, right? Because everyone's always listening to what

everyone was doing. And I feel like it may be, you know, that one and perhaps even more the Blue Notebooks, it kind of gave permission for people to go, oh, hang on, there is this other space, which is maybe more omnivorous and a bit more inclusive. And yeah, I mean, I guess it started something. How important is melody for you? Melody is super important. I mean, that's not to say every piece has to be focused on melody, but I think we imprint on a piece of music.

The melody feels like a protagonist. It feels like the us in the music. You know, like a duckling will imprint on any old thing and you just follow it around. And I think we do that with melody. It's really fundamental. And I think even with like pieces which are maybe like ambient, say,

So you maybe think, oh, well, it's not really melodic. But if I think of, you know, say, discrete music, Brian Eno, it's full of amazing melody. And I sing those melodies. It's like, oh, this one, you know, here comes this one. And they're like characters, right? And I think there's something very basic about melody for us. It connects to song, it connects to the human voice,

folk music, lullabies. How do you choose to use voices when you do, as opposed to say strings? I choose voices for, I guess, a lot of reasons. I mean, the pure color of them is amazing. It's so flexible, so expressive. I mean, it's the most direct way to communicate a feeling, right? It's so clear.

There's also something about putting people in a piece of music. You know, if you have voices, you have, like, if you imagine how the piece looks when you're hearing it, or hearing it, there's suddenly there's people there. You know, whereas with instrumental music, sometimes it can feel like it's just the sounds, it's just the instruments, especially with electronic music, obviously. And I mean, that's special in its own way,

but there's something about having the human voice involved. It just tells stories in a very special, direct way. I mean, that's why, like, the vocal is so kind of central in pop music, right? I mean, it's like all about that character telling the story. Tell me about where rhythm fits into your work. Well, I guess rhythm for me comes from ways of making time pass. One of my sort of like aha moments was discovering the music of the minimalist, the New York minimalist, early stuff, Philip Glass and Steve Reich and Terry Riley.

And the way that they used pulsation as a way to make time pass at different speeds and the use of repetition. Like repetition is incredible because it allows you to re-experience the same moment. I discovered this via the milkman who delivered the milk to our house when I was a kid. He would hear me practicing my piano when I was 14, 13. And he started delivering records with the milk, including like really experimental stuff. Like the early Philip class things, early telling Riley stuff. So cool.

Absolutely amazing guy. Yeah. That sounds like a seminal event in your life. It was 100%. I don't know anyone else who's had that experience. That's right. I mean, I think everything sort of fits together, doesn't it? I mean, I think the first thing for me really was just falling in love with music.

Like, absolutely just sort of 100%. Did your parents love music as well? My father was an engineer, mechanical engineer. My mother loved music, played the piano as an amateur. But she, I think, you know, for her music was essentially divine. It was like a portal, right? She felt that completely. And so I think I got a sort of sense of reverence for music as a thing from her.

Lucky. Yeah, I agree. So it's always felt like it had this kind of special, kind of, numinous kind of quality for me. There was a time when every great thinker had a confidant, a trusted companion with whom to wrestle ideas, to think out loud, to help uncover the essence of what path to take next and how best to follow through. That role has always mattered because meaningful problems require context, patience, and the ability to hold complexity. Anthropic developed Claude for just this kind of thinking. Claude is for minds that don't stop at good enough.

It's the collaborator that understands all aspects of your enterprise and advances along with you. Whether you're debugging code at midnight or strategizing your next business move, Claude sharpens your thinking to tackle the problems that matter most. Rather than offering isolated answers, Claude is built for sustained inquiry. Claude synthesizes information from multiple sources,

turning scattered material into a coherent analysis presented with a clear structure. It even includes citations. Patterns appear that would otherwise remain buried. Claude operates with continuity by securely connecting to professional tools, documents, calendars, and project platforms. At its core, Claude reflects a different philosophy,

of artificial intelligence, one that emphasizes collaboration over automation, depth over immediacy, and thinking with rather than thinking for. For problems worth solving, get started with Claude at clod.a.ai slash tetra. Try it today. Do you hear music in your head and then bring it to life? I do have music playing in my head all the time. You know, writing on paper, which is what I do if I'm writing instrumental music, because you're pre-imagining, it's a different process to sitting at the piano and going,

oh, yeah, or that, or sitting at the computer and going, let's try that, I know, let's change it, try that, you know. So it's kind of a different process. And I think sometimes you can get sort of deeper into an idea almost without, you know, hearing it, without playing it, without working. You can sort of get to the core of the thing just on a piece of paper. And is that an ordinary practice for you to sit down with a pad and think music and write it without humming, without playing anything? Yeah.

I mean, you're hearing it, you know, in your head. Yeah. What might it sound like? I've asked myself that it doesn't really sound like any. It just hear it. would hearing it be the right word or would it be a different word? I don't know. You'd have to wire my brain up and see if I am actually hearing it.

But, I mean, I think this is, it's part of, in a way, the traditional training for a composer. You know, I feel kind of lucky in that I studied at the time when a composer's training was basically the same as it had been 200 years previously. There are real benefits to that, just being able to sort of handle structures and grammar and materials mentally. You can try them on the piano and stuff, but it's basically going on inside you. It allows you to kind of distill stuff down. I guess within that culture, there was also maybe, you know, there was a lot of rules,

like stuff you're not allowed to do. And I really did have a problem with that. How many of the pieces that I've heard, which is all of your recorded music, It's okay. Would have come without playing and how much would come sitting in a piano or some other instrument? I don't know, maybe a third or something. You know, there's no point me sitting down and going, oh, I know that, you know, that Moog is going to do this. Because then you're responding to the color and what the instrument's doing.

One of the nice things is the journey the piece makes, you know, from your desk to the musicians and what they bring to it. And then it's like, oh, well, it could go like this. And then it's discovery. And that's wonderful. It's so much about intentions and attitude. We've had some amazing experiences with, I guess, mostly younger orchestras who bring a kind of a freshness and enthusiasm and passion and energy.

And it's just like, it's just so moving to see, you know, people bringing themselves to a piece. And that's magic. I've had experiences with older, maybe more like established and senior orchestras, where you just think, why are we here? And it's so much about the people, and it's so much about the kind of culture and why. In popular music, the things that we like best are made by the younger versions of themselves. Yeah, that's right.

Is that true in classical music as well? I think what's interesting about young artists is you get the kind of, you know, like the first album, is like all the things they've been thinking about for their entire life up to that moment, which is why the second album is so hard, right? Because it's like, oh, well, I've spent, you know, 18 years thinking about this music. For the first album, we're now 18 months later, I'm supposed to deliver another one. It's tough. I think with classical music, because it's composer performers are not so much the norm,

you know, it's more about just making the piece and then the piece in a way lives its own life, actually. it goes out and it just sort of finds its way. And it's not so connected to the person, I think. It's just more about what that piece is doing. I don't know. I sort of feel like I hope I'm getting better. I feel like I'm getting closer to music. I'm sort of deeper in it.

But I don't know. How do you know when a piece is done? Like having a piece which is not done is like having an itch you can't scratch. you know, it just keeps coming back into your mind. It's just like, you might think, oh, you know, you've done a big pass on something, and you've, like, in a way, solved the problem of the piece.

You've answered the question of the piece. But it doesn't, you can't sleep properly on it, you know, and it's just like, it hasn't arrived. Would you say it haunts you? It kind of does, yeah. Sometimes it's like, oh, we're done. But more often it's about sort of, incremental polishing the tile a little more, you know, all the time.

Do you tend to write short things that get longer? I usually start with some little tiny object which fascinates me, and then just kind of organically follow it. But at a certain point, it'll be mostly about taking away. I'm trying to sort of do the maximum with a minimum. I don't want to kind of clutter the world up. There's a lot of music in the world, right? So I want to try and tell the story with the minimum amount of materials.

What percentage of the music you've written have you released? Probably less than half. I mean, there's a lot, yeah. I mean, there's a lot. Yeah, yeah. And does it become obvious when it's time for something to be finished and come out, or not always? Sometimes pieces, it just doesn't, for, you know, whatever reason it might be an artistic thought, or it might be to do with not being able to present it properly in the world at that moment

or whatever it might be. There are pieces now, which I was like, I wish, you know, we could just release that. But if I released everything I wrote, then I would be releasing an album every month. That doesn't really make any sense. How many iterations would you say each piece goes through? Some pieces just kind of, you write them and it's done. Other things, it takes some times. it takes some time, you know, and I actually enjoy that process. I enjoy the process of searching,

right, of not knowing, that's what I like. That's what's so interesting about the creative process, you know, because you sort of discover stuff you weren't expecting, and you discover things about your own mind and process. Earlier you also spoke about having a tiny object and it turning into more. Yeah, I mean, I guess maybe one example. is the way the melody works in, on the nature of daylight, actually, which is just two notes, and then this fifth, this rocking fifth. So it's like the simplest thing. And what I like to try and do is I like to try and dig material out

or kind of find properties in it by just turning it around, about walking around a sculpture. So when the piece plays... So in a way, it's like super simple, and it's like a piece of geometry, almost, you know. But I'm trying to discover properties in that, which maybe I hadn't seen at the beginning, or maybe we, as listeners, you know, listening,

we haven't maybe found or expected. So it's like a mining operation into the material. Will it typically be the right, hand that's playing the tiny object and then the left hand is moving around it. Yeah, it's like context, isn't it? I think that's partly to do with how we perceive music. You know, in the physical world, large objects move slowly. And to me, that maps onto kind of register in music. You know, so the bass, of course, can move fast, but it's less likely to, you know? So a piece like Vladimir's blues, the bass is moving very slowly.

And again, Vladimir's Blues, it's just one little, it's just, it's kind of one little idea, which, for me, it tells, it tells a story, and it's like a tiny moment in the Blue Notebooks, and the Blue Notebooks has got some somber material in it, but that piece is quite bright, I think. So this figure comes from, it's Chopin, basically, it does that all the time. The reason I sort of used it is because, I love butterflies. And there's a pianist called Giza King from the beginning of the 20th century German pianist

who loved butterflies. And he was an expert on all kinds of mountain butterflies, including the blues, which is the family of butterflies. And he has one named after him, actually. But also Vladimir Nabokov was an expert on butterflies, and he also was an expert on blues. So Vladimir's blues.

And I like this idea that this little figure It's like wings beating. It's like flapping. You know, I really like when a piece of music can kind of, as well as telling a story, that it can actually sort of, in its structure, in its DNA, it can actually reflect what the subject is. It implies movement.

Right. Something flapping. I first felt rain. Right. Okay. When you have something you like on paper, do you always know how you want it to translate to instruments? Yes, I'll be, usually, I'll be thinking of like, oh, this is going to be, whatever, strings or something like, you know, because then you're writing also for the way the instruments like to, you know, what they like to do.

I do want the experience of playing a piece to kind of make sense to the musician. I know this is incredibly hard, but it does have to go this way. In On the Nature of Daylight, there's a second violin part, which is ridiculously. hard just because of it does the thing which violinists hate doing, which is play fifths, it's just so hard and it's a difficult key and it's very slow and you know, it's all like, it's all the worst things. And yet it does have to go that way. So yeah, because that's how it goes. Because that's how it goes. So, you know, but I'm trying to, I'm trying to sort of make the piece feel like it's a, there's an element of sort of conversation and collaboration with the

performance themselves. I was talking with a friend of mine about, this the other day and he was saying, well, actually, this is like in a classical music context, audiences in a way they quite like seeing someone like overcome a great, you know, climb a mountain, right? There's something special about that. Would you say there's a thread that runs through all of your work? It's probably to do with a kind of a perspective on how is it to be a person in the world. A lot of things I've done are very, they come out of a kind of a quite a personal emotional emotionality. Maybe the Blue Notebooks is like that in a way. They're also about the world we live in, you know, society. Again, that record is, you know, comes out of the Iraq or conflict or

piece like Voices, which is, you know, the Universal Declaration. So it's a, it's, it's that sort of dialogue between like an interior, if you like, journey or asking questions about meaning, but also about how we how we connect in the world and what culture, what creativity can do in society because I believe in music. I do. I do believe in it in its ability to kind of just elevate us. Even sad music. Sure. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. And even, you know, in a tiny way, you know, if I'm, I get up in the morning, I'm making my coffee or whatever. I turn on the radio, there's some piece of music I love. My gaze a tiny bit better. It's like one percent. Some days more. Some days more. But, you know, even that little, the tiny thing, I just feel like it's a very

vandigal thing. Tell me about the people who come to see you perform live. It's a real mix because I've done a lot of movies and I've made records and I, you know, so I think there are like different audiences when they sort of meet in the gigs. I guess what's nice is that it is mostly like younger people. You know, classical music audience average age is like in the 60s or 70s. And the average age at my gigs is like 28. Amazing. So, you know, for me, that's amazing. It's a beautiful thing.

And I do feel sort of, you know, very lucky about that, actually, because it's an audience which is very kind of open-eared. I've not seen you live. How do you present your material live? We play the records as records. So we've just been touring a program, which is the Blue Notebooks and In a Landscape, which is the most recent thing. just the two records.

And then is there a visual aspect as well? There is. It's a very minimal thing. We've been working with a friend of mine, Edlin, who's a wonderful... I love her. She's great, right? She designed a very beautiful kind of lighting installation that we play in.

And basically, the gigs are mostly in Surround. When the lights go down, the body gets to work. Sleep is not passive time. It's an active body. biological state, one in which the brain clears metabolic waste, the nervous system resets, and the body begins repair at a cellular level. During sleep, muscles recover. Hormones that regulate growth, metabolism, and stress are released. Memory is consolidated. Immune activity increases. After years, of research and development, AG1 has formulated AGZ, a nighttime drink designed to support the body during this essential nightly window.

Each serving provides magnesium and zinc. Minerals studied for their roles in nervous system function and recovery, alongside carefully selected botanicals to help the body transition from stimulation to rest. AGZ doesn't induce sleep. It supports the physiological conditions that allow sleep and the work that happens during it to unfold naturally. No artificial sweetness, no GMOs, gluten-free and dairy-free. AG-1 powers up the day. AGZ settles down the night.

Together they reflect a simple idea. Health isn't built in one moment. It's built over a full 24-hour cycle. Learn more at drinkag1.com slash tetra. Try it tonight. Is there a difference between what it feels like playing a symphony hall versus a black box? I mean, the big thing is the acoustics. Better in the symphony hall?

different because it's amplified, right? So we're playing amplified. That can be problematic if the room itself is very live, you know, because orchestral rooms tend to be pretty live. So sometimes you're in a dialogue with the acoustic, a black box you complete control, so it's easy in a way. Over the course of your life, who've been the biggest musical inspirations? On the classical side, in a way, it's like the ones that everyone loves, you know, like Bach, Obviously, that's the starting point for me. Purcell, I love, Schubert, Mahler, Stravinsky. And then in pop music, in electronic music,

big moment for me was hearing Autobahn when I was a kid. That was huge. That was an aggressive record, wasn't it? I mean, it's so mad, you know, and it starts with those car sounds and things. But that baseline, you know, when that baseline starts, I was just like, what is this? because I was 13. I didn't know electronic music.

And I went on this kind of almost like a quest to discover it. Because I'd heard this thing on a BBC documentary. And I wrote a letter to the BBC and said, what is this music please? Put a stamp on it, took it to a postbox, waited six weeks, got a letter back. It's cuffed back. Altabarn. So I saved up my pocket money, got on the bus, went to the record store, an altabarn, came back, dropped the news. needle on the thing and I was just like transfixed. It's like what are these sounds? So then the next thing is I

pested my parents and like synthesizer synthesizer and they're like well it costs as much as a house. So that's a no. But there are these kids so you could literally build a sin from a kid. I've got one of these things and just spent weeks and weeks of the soldering on build this thing in my bedroom. started to just be able to listen to those sounds and work with those sounds. Do you think the fact that you built the synthesizer versus buying one had some effect on you? It exhausted me. This is really hard. And I didn't know what I was doing.

Fortunately, you know, I had my dad around who wasn't, you know, an engineer, electrical engineer and mechanical engineer. He was like, that's a live wire. You're going to die if you'd, you know, that sort of thing. hilarious but anyway i got the thing working did it make a good sound yeah i mean it's fun um it's a synth actually it's a thing called a transcendent 2000 which is designed by a guy called tim oar who designed the oscar and some other quite eminent sins you know and there's a few people who built this kit like thomas dolby wow built one the guy from new order the producer of new order

I've forgotten his name. He also built one and there's actually a lot of Blue Mondays, like Transcendant 2000. Wow. No one had any money, right? So it's like, let's all build the kid. So weirdly, all around the place of people building this thing. Would you record yourself on a cassette recorder?

Yeah. Was recording always important to you? Or did you just like playing the instrument? It was a question of money. You know, if I'd had any funds, I would have like bought everything. And, you know, I'd have got into recording way sooner. But it was really expensive. Everything was so expensive at that time.

There were major hurdles to entry. Is there any one composer that you've been most influenced by? There's been a few. I mean, I love Marla so much, and I love Schubert so much. Do you see them in your work or no? I see Schubert in my work, I think. There's a lot, you know. I mean, I like, in a way, Cage wasn't it?

He's more like an inventor, but I love his whole. all of openness and perspective on things. I mean, Brian had a big influence of Brian Nino had a big influence on me. You know, as a kid, you know, discrete music, music for airports, those were foundational. You know, I really, it was like, uh, okay, a different way of hearing, a different way of being. Absolutely. Laurie Anderson, Meredith Monk.

Yeah, I love Meredith. Oh, she's a genius, you know, incredible. Earlier you said that you have worked with Schubert's music. Right. and he played me a sample of something from Schubert, and then show me how you reworked it into what it became. The most obvious one, I guess, is in Infra. It was made around the attacks in London

of 7-7 bombings, underground and buses. And this was a ballet. And when I started thinking about the ballet, I was thinking about travelers, because it was in the morning commute. So then I thought about traveling music, And one of the big pieces of traveling music is Schubert's Winterweiser. And it has this lovely tune.

You know, it has this, you know, it's got this kind of movement sort of walking. So I just sort of wove that into like the string writing. But then I wanted to make a piano piece in there. So then I was thinking about other Schubert materials. So there's the G flat impromptu. Yeah, so that's a gorgeous bit of Schubert. And I thought, okay, so what I'm going to do is because this piece is, this piece has a kind of a darkness about it, so instead of it being G-flat, major. So I made this piece in for three.

Totally transformed. So basically it takes like, like Schubert's atoms and kind of just turns the lights down. down on it. This melody that he has in his piece, that's, he gets that from Beethoven, gets that from Beethoven 7. Yeah, so that's, but that piece is about the dance, right? So I'm like trying to sort of lift it past the darkness by like referring to the Beethoven as well. When you play them in a row, I could see how it becomes unrecognizable because the mood is, is so different. Yeah, because the infra has got a kind of, it's like, it's sort of searching.

It's like, you know, that sort of somber, whereas, you know, is Schubert, right? That's his. I mean, that's just pure gold for me. I mean, I just love that so much, but that's the kind of obvious example, or clear one, yeah. That's amazing.

Describe the place that you make music in. I work in my studio, which is a studio, My partner, Yulia, and I built in the woods outside Oxford. It was a tractor shed, a big old barn. And we put a bunch of studios in there. And Yulia is a, she works in visual art. So she has her studio. We have a cafe, and we have like production rooms,

and then a recording room. And my studio and a mixed room and stuff. So it's a kind of laboratory in the countryside. It's very much about the forest and us. You know, it's like very light, open spaces, kind of soften that binary between the technology and the natural world and just try and keep those kind of interchange. It's interesting, so many recording studios are just sealed boxes.

Oh, man. And yeah, soul stealing. Yeah, yeah, I mean, our life from one wall is completely a window out onto the forest, and then there are skylights. And it's this kind of organic feeling as it can be. You're right. You know, traditional recording studios are kind of,

they're hostile to organic life, aren't they? They really are. You know, it's a black box. The acoustic is like oppressive. Yeah, it's just a downer. Yeah, the only thing that gives them life is knowing the things that have been recorded there before. Right, yeah.

You go to Happy Road and it's a box. Yeah. But a lot of things have to do that box? Yeah, it's true, yeah. Do you have any rituals around writing? I keep pretty regular hours. You know, I think that's important. You kind of get into a rhythm then. I mean, they're around like nine in the morning, half nine. You know, we're up early. We're up at like six and doing all that. What do you do between six and nine? Oh, you know, meditate, you know, exercise and drink cups of tea quietly, that kind of thing.

What's your meditation practice? So I have a Zen practice. I studied with an event. A wonderful teacher, Ticknatan, in the end of the eighties. So how old were you at the time? Mid-20s. It's a sort of classic moment when you're searching, you know, wondering how to make sense of things. How would you say that impacted your life? In every possible way. Yeah, I mean, I think it gives context and a framework and a way to approach the data.

today, you know, in a way. I mean, it's underlies kind of everything I do. I didn't know that about you, but I can hear the Zen in your work now that you say it. Tell me about beauty. Beauty is worth striving for and worth celebrating and worth exploring. And in a sense, I think within Western culture, we do have a bit of a hang-up about beautiful artworks. For example, like within classical music criticism, there is a kind of suspiciousness about things which are like overtly beautiful. They're considered maybe insubstantial or not serious.

But I just don't believe it. I don't believe it. It seems like most of the great music up until modern music was all beautiful. Exactly. So if you adopt that, you erase everything that came before. Exactly. And that seems ridiculous.

Yeah, it is ridiculous. But, you know, that is literally what, you know, like Boulat said, you know, wanted to erase music history, burn down the opera houses and start over, you know, with this kind of music which was post-second World War all about, you know, conflicts and all kinds of other things. To me, I see, like, the role of creativity in the world. as a way to understand one another, as a way to celebrate human experience and to tell stories. I don't think those are like ugly things. If I have like affection for a piece of music, that's great news.

Yes, and even if it's dealing with a serious or difficult subject matter. I agree. I agree. And I think it's interesting because actually I hang up, I would say it comes from sort of the Western canon. You know, this isn't the universal in human cultures. I mean, you know, in many sort of non-Western cultures, you know, creativity is all about beauty. You know, it's all about celebrating those things. So it's an interesting one, I think. Tell me about the role of devotion in music historically. The original art music comes from pretty much out of liturgical

chant. So you had elaborations of like you had original plain chants and then you slowly you start to get elaborations of the plain chant and that leads to kind of art music in the Renaissance. In parallel with that you have a kind of a tradition of like courtly love songs and other kinds of materials of that sort which are almost like they're the sort of worldly music in a way. And lots of composers wrote both. You know, I mean, someone like Guillaume de Mache, an incredible visionary composer of the 14th century. He writes, you know, he writes the mess of Notre Dame, but he also writes incredible sort of almost folky songs, beautifully made, but, you know, very direct, love songs, all kinds of things like that,

stories. The devotional sort of attitude persists in, in Western classical music, in a big way, all the way to Bach. And then slowly, I guess, as the sort of 17th to 18th centuries move on, the Enlightenment comes, other things start to replace it, and you get romanticism, which is a pantheistic thing, a sort of a nature, you know, wordsworths on the lake, you know, all this kind of stuff. I guess you'd say Schubert Schumann, all of these people.

And then it, you know, in the 20th century, everything evaporates. In a world of artificial highs and harsh stimulants, there is something different, something clean, something precise. Athletic nicotine, not the primitive products found behind convenience store counters, not the aggressive buzz that leaves you jittery, but a careful calibration of clean energy and focused clarity. Athletic nicotine, the lowest dose tobacco-free nicotine available, made entirely in the USA. No artificial sweeteners, just pure, purposeful elevation. Athletic nicotine is a performance neutropic. Athletic nicotine is a tool for shifting mindsets.

Athletic nicotine is a partner in pursuit of excellence. Slow release, low dose, gradual lift, sustained energy, soft landing, inspired results. Athletic nicotine, more focus, less static. Athletic nicotine, more clarity, less noise, athletic nicotine, more accuracy, less anxiety, athletic nicotine, from top athletes pushing their limits to artists pursuing their vision. Athletic nicotine offers the lift you've been looking for. Learn more at athletic nicotine.com slash tetra and experience next level performance with athletic nicotine. Nicotine is an addictive chemical.

How does folk music work its way into classical over time? Folk music is always there. Just at certain points, art music, classical music composers, start to kind of go, hey, hang on a minute, you know, and they sort of engage with it. So you get it quite a bit in like 19th century, mid, late 19th century music, for example, like in Russia, and later on you get it in like the Baltic,

in like Sibelius, you know, so like the music becomes like a project of like nation building in a way. And then in the 20th century you have people like, you know, folks on collectors. So recording folk songs and then they get used. Like in England you get Vaughan Williams and Delius and those kind of people. In Hungary Bartok famously, you know, uses folk song. So they become like a resource. If you hear a third, French composer versus a Hungarian composer, do they have a different language that they use? They do. Can you give me an example of the different regions as best you can? Oh, it's really hard. I mean, the thing about French music, you know, it's got this, had this,

I guess probably through the 19th century. It has this emphasis on, like, beautiful colors. Like Debussy. Like Debussy, like Forre, like Ravel, all of these, and it has this kind of, sensuous colour, you know, it's about that. Like, going back to like Bartok, Hungarian music, you know, Hungarian music is, a lot of it is derived from like folk rhythms. So it's kind of got a spikier texture, you know, asymmetrical rhythms, fives and sevens and these kinds of things, you know. And English music is, it just feels English, right?

It's just got this kind of, what is it? Can you describe what makes English music sound? like that. There is some folk song influence. There is also influence from the Protestant hymn book, Renaissance music, you know, like choral, polyphonic writing, part songs. Those things are big in English music culture. I don't know what it is, you know. It's just got this thing. If you were to take a piece of Renaissance music from Italy and play it in an English style, would you know what to do? What's funny is that even at that time,

even in the Renaissance, you know, it was fashionable to be like Italian. So Italian music had this kind of, in a way, it was kind of hip. English music was maybe had a more formality about it, possibly. And actually...

Some of the hipness. Yeah, in a way. But what's funny is that English composers used to go to Italy, study in Italy, and then pretend they were Italian. and go back to England and get a gig. Wow.

There was a guy called Joseph Cooper who came back to England after studying in Italy, and he called himself Coprario. He's not Italian. Amazing. So it always had this kind of draw, you know, the magical south. And do you think it was the English love of Italy, or was it more the exotic nature of someone who comes from somewhere else? You know, the Italian Renaissance held an incredible sort of magnetic pull

over like English arts and letters, music, all through the sort of 18th and 19th centuries. I mean, it was just huge. What happens to organ music when you played on the piano? Yeah, that's interesting, isn't it? I mean, there are some amazing arrangements of organ music, and this beautiful arrangement of a couple of Bacharral preludes, which are just stunning.

People have been playing them over the last few years. Vickinger plays a bunch of them. So, I mean, you have to make compromises because you haven't got the infinite sustain, and you've only got two hands, not, you can't use your feet. So you've, it's a bit of a, you know, it's a bit of a process. What was the first time you ever played in front of people? Well, I mean, I played a university, you know, little university gigs.

I was cripplingly nervous, so nervous. The first orchestral piece that anyone ever played in mine, which was at university, I actually couldn't even go. I just kind of sat in the pub. next door and just waited for it all to be over because I was like so. Did you like to rehearsal? Yeah, I went to rehearsal, yeah. But I, for the premiere, I was just too much. Too much. It was just a kind of a whole blind panic of, is it any good? It's definitely not any good. Will people know they will definitely know? Yeah.

Is the performance going to be okay? No, it's going to be a disaster. You know, all that stuff. Do you think it has to do with the intimacy of music that, It's so personal to you that it's like marching out on stage naked. It kind of is. It kind of is. I mean, it's a paradox, isn't it? Because, you know, we make these things. And then we put them out in the world.

But they are really private as well. Yes. In a sense, you know. So, yeah, I guess I was just, I was completely freaked out at that time. I mean, now I love playing live, you know, because it's, there's so many nice. nice things about it. You know, it's a real-time experience with people in a room. We've all agreed to come here together. There's a kind of audience community. There's a community of the performers. There's going on the journey together. It's so special. It really is. And there was a point in time

when that was the only way to experience music. Yeah. It has more value now than ever before because music is available in so many other ways. Yeah. That we miss that communal experience. It's the campfire, isn't it? It's that sort of very basic human connection, just being together listening. Does a piece of music exist before you write it? Interesting. I mean, I think you sometimes have a feeling that, you know, sometimes it'll just land so fast. You're just literally just writing it out. It doesn't happen that often, but sometimes you feel like, well, that was really quick, you know, and it's just there. In your meditation practice, does music ever come up?

It does, but in a funny kind of way, it's probably my little holiday from music, because I have got music playing in my head like all the time. Yeah. So it's actually a slightly different thing. Is the music that's playing all the time familiar or not? It's just little bits and pieces. It's like, you know, when a little dog gets a bone and they just can't stop,

it's like that you know if I'm working on a piece and it's like part of your brain is like always working on it always and from beginning from the first idea to the end of the piece months later part of your brain is always

working on it. It just is and are all the little pieces of music in your head familiar to you or are there any that have made there not things that you're working on or hadn't thought about before? Yeah stuff just pops up

Totally. It's just some little fragment. Tell me about collaboration. You know, a lot of my work over the years has been just me sitting in a room, you know, just like a piece of paper, piano, just doing this, you know, for hours and days. And of course, you know, that goes then to the musicians and the studio and we, you know, figure it out, we work it and we find the thing in the room and the day. And that's cool. But, you know, I do kind of start thinking, you know, this is a bit, it's just me in a room. Therefore, I really like, you know, for example, going movies or working on ballet or when you've got other people, there's a dialogue, there's kind of conversations going on. I really enjoy that. I like the puzzle-solving aspect of movies as well.

The kind of, you know, what if, how about this? I like that. It's very enjoyable. Do you like other types of puzzles outside of music? I wouldn't say I'm a good chess player, but I quite like a game of chess. Yeah. Do you actively? research for a project.

I try to understand the kind of the world of the piece as much as I can. You know, like with Matt Adam and the recent ballet, you know, that's, so it's three big novels. So Margaret, you know, wrote this amazing stuff, so the first thing is to just read the novels and live in the world of the novels and then try to pull materials out of the text. I mean, there are characters in the novels who are these kind of transhuman creatures which have been engineered. not to be violent. And they have amazing voices. They have these glassy, crystalline voices. And Margaret writes a lot about their voices. And I was like, that's the spine of the music. So I've got these voices. So there's kinds of things. You know, I'm playing an example of that. Okay. So the kind of main spine of Mad Adam is based around this line.

Just carries on like that. So it's a falling thing. It all. It also feels like code because it's a sort of, it's got a kind of a pattern. And it in a way expresses the idea that these characters are like they're engineered, you know, there are there. And there's a lot of other kind of code in the books. So they sing a lot of this material. So there's a lot of music of this sort in there. That becomes a kind of a spine through the piece.

and the Crakers, they're called Crakers, these little characters. And they sing, it's kind of pre-echoed in Act 1 and Act 2 of the ballet, and then in the third act they get to sing this melody. So beautiful. Thank you. If you didn't make music, what do you think you would do with your time? I love poetry. I love literature.

I would be in some way, not to say I could write, because that's a whole other thing, but I might be something around writing. I remember when I was at school, there was like a careers thing. You know, what were you going to be? Fill out this questionnaire. So I filled out my questionnaire. And it came up, poet or gardener. Yeah.

And you're both. Turned out you're both. That's right. I'm both of those things. You're poet and a gardener at the piano. Exactly. I garden at the piano every day. Tell me about your relationship to the Beatles' music.

Okay, so the Beatles were really influential on me as a kid. I was probably about 10 when I first heard Abby Road because my parents had it. And it was considered like, in a way, like too strong a medicine for a young kid. You know, they wouldn't play me Abby Wright. They would hear it, but it was like, oh, no, no, that's far too, you know. But they did buy me the red and the blue compilations. So I just hoovered those up. I absolutely hoovered them up.

I was sitting in that chair after school with a headphones on every day, all day. And almost by accident, you know, you learn about how harmony works and song structure and drama and, you know, architecture. Amazing. Absolutely amazing. Tell me the different ways you've recorded. As far as the records are concerned, it's always on tape. It's always analog. analog two-inch and analog mix, you know, on good days analog masters, or then, you know,

we mix and then goes to protels. But I'm very interested and I really appreciate the kind of tactile qualities of analog recording. I think it's a little bit like the difference between being told a story or presented with some measurements about something. It's a little different, I mean, the difference is now not so wide, but certainly it was like night and day for a long time. So, you know, the studio we have, we have all a completely analog signal chain, which is wonderful.

But then, you know, there are other things. It just depends, you know. I mean, there are things like there are piano recordings I made on a portable cassette thing. There's a piece called Lullaby for the West Coast Sleepers, which I recorded in a beautiful place up on the West Coast of Scotland, Creer, which is like this art centre, and they've got a fantastic piano.

We were there staying there with the kids, and this was a long time ago. And I was just like, I'd just love to just go and play that piano, but the kids are sleeping. So I just put the tape recorder, like, basically on the piano and just played this little piece, which I just basically made up on the spot. But because the kids were sleeping,

and I didn't want to wake them, It was like I played it so quietly. But, you know, that's just a little homebrew recording, and it's on the record. If you were to play the same piece at a medium volume or at a very, very quiet volume, what would be the different effect of those things? The quieter you play, the more people lean in.

They lean forward. It's like what happened with singers. Go back to the 19th century, everyone's making a huge noise. But they figured out that if you go really close to the microphone and you croon into it very quietly. It's like got this really special intimacy and people lean in, don't they? It's that whispering in your ear thing.

If somebody whispers in your ear, then you sort of, yeah, you lean forward. Do you experiment with how loud to play things when you're recording? I don't really. I probably, I just sort of try to play it as I imagine it. Sometimes you think, oh no, that's just a miscalculation. You have to do it again.

I mean, one thing that's we've got actually at the studios, which has been really interesting, is we have this Spiro piano, which is, you know, this recording piano that can play itself, that Steinway made. And that's actually pretty amazing because, so you can do a take and then go next door and have a listen how the microphones heard it, you know, rather than how you were thinking, you know, when you're hearing, you're so busy, you know, so you don't hear in quite the same way. And that's been really interesting. So the piano can replay what you just played, and you could change the sound in the...

Exactly, or I could say, oh, no, I need to play a quieter or a loud or different. That's beautiful. Yeah, it's an amazing, amazing instrument. You tend to do a lot of takes? Not really. And do you mainly listen to vinyl? Yeah. At home, it's interesting, because the studio, obviously, it's an atmosphere with, like, big ATCs everywhere.

You know, it sounds super accurate. At home, I've got like a quite dark-sounding valve amp, big old tanoys, vinyl. Because it's a different thing. You know, I just want, at home, I want vibes. I don't want, like, accuracy. Yeah. I just want, like, good vibes. Which that does.

L-M-N-T, Element Electrolites. Have you ever felt dehydrated after an intense workout? or a long day in the sun? Do you want to maximize your endurance and feel your best? Add element electrolytes to your daily routine. Perform better and sleep deeper. Improve your cognitive function. Experience an increase in steady energy with fewer headaches and fewer muscle cramps.

Element electrolytes. Drink it in the sauna. Refreshing flavors include grapefruit, citrus, watermen. melon and chocolate salt. Formulated with the perfect balance of sodium, potassium, and magnesium to keep you hydrated and energized throughout the day. These minerals help conduct the electricity

that powers your nervous system so you can perform at your very best. Element electrolytes are sugar-free, keto-friendly, and great tasting. Minerals are the stuff of life. So visit Drink LMND. dot com slash tetra. And stay salty with element electrolyte,

L-M-N-T. What was the first music that was your music, not the music that you heard that your parents played? Probably some of the early electronic music, some of the early, like, psychedelic music, some of the early Pink Floyd things. The Beatles, actually, in a way, some of it.

You know, they're like the White album was definitely my mom, and they were not into that. You know, the White album was too out there. And then, yeah, some of the like, Kraft Trek stuff, those kinds of things. And then also punk, because punk came along when I was, you know, 11, 12, that kind of age.

Perfect. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah, so we all got into that. And that was fun. Who was the first concert you ever went to? I don't know which was first. I went to Kraftwerk at Hammersmith when they did the computer world tours.

That was 1980, I guess. It would have been 81. I saw Queen at Wembley. And that was the day after John Lennon was shot. So that dates the gig, because they played Imagine. Yeah. And then there was the clash and stiff little fingers and those kinds of bands,

probably a bit earlier, actually. Probably a bit before that. But they were like terrifying, sweaty little gigs. What would you say you listen to mostly? I listen to a lot of jazz. quite a lot of electronic and pop music, and I listen to a lot of songwriting of all different kinds, a lot of classical music, you know.

It's funny because, you know, we have kids, so at a certain point, your listening is taken away from you, and it becomes they're like, they're in charge, you know. So I've listened to a lot of, you know, what my kids are listening to. How old are your kids? I mean, they would be shocked that I call them kids. They're 27, 26, and 18. And where do their tastes lie?

They are all very eclectic and interested in the sort of nooks and crannies of kind of popular music. Maybe because they grew up in your house. Could be. Could be. If you're on a flight, would you be more likely to watch a movie, read a book, or listen to music with headphones? I find listening to music on flights, it's just, even with noise-canceling headphones, it's just too annoying. I don't particularly like noise-canceling headphones. They kind of make me feel weird.

Me too. So I use them in an emergency, but basically I try to avoid them. There's something about the pressure. I don't know what it is. It's weird. It does something with your inner ear. In flights, I tend to, I basically try and sleep. Basically, I'm a really good sleeper.

I love sleeping. Let's talk about sleep. How did your sleep project come to be? Yeah, so this comes out of a conversation Yulia and I were having at the time. This is about 2011, 2012. It's when people started live streaming gigs, you know. So, yeah, some venue or other had just streamed the show when it was going out, and it was in some crazy time zone.

So Yuli was in Berlin at the time. So it was like 4 a.m. or something. She was hearing this gig and sort of floating in and out of sleep, and she was like, this is incredibly, I'm hearing this in a different way. It's very powerful. It's very impactful. This is something, you know, here's an idea. And then, yeah, I sort of decided to try and,

engage with this from a musical perspective, to write a piece which was specifically about that environment, that space, that borderland territory, and to look at some of the neuroscience around sleep and incorporate those things into the structure of the piece. You know, what is sleep in our culture now in society? Being sleep is, as it were, unproductive. You're not a productive economic unit while you're sleeping, so sleep is an act of resistance. really. It's a pause, right? So can we make a piece which supports that pause? So these are the kind of ideas that were floating around. When was it clear to you to make it long? That happened pretty much straight away. That was like, okay, so the piece is overnight. The piece is a landscape that you

inhabit while you're sleeping. Do you only ever perform it at night? Yeah, we started, we time it so that the last 40 minutes happen with dawn. Wow. So we start 11 or 12 or 10 or whenever it happens to be in that place at that time of year, you know. Yeah, and we play straight through. You know, the audience are in beds. So there's like a few hundred people. We did it in Berlin in the power station, you know, which is amazing.

When you go on the concert stage, you're projecting this material, right, normally. You're like, we've got to tell this story to these people. But when we started playing sleep, we're like, oh, no. No, no, no, no. That's not it at all. What we're doing is we're accompanying something that's going on in that room. And what's going on in that room is a community is forming. So all those strangers have decided to trust one another and just kind of do this, right? And that's really special.

So actually, even though we play sleep at concert volume, I mean, it's very, it's strong. Wow. And like the subs in sleep, it's like a massage, right? Yeah. But it allows people to just kind of connect. So like the last part of sleep, people are mostly awake because it gets quite loud. And also what I do is I, the spectrum of the piece for most of its duration sort of mimics the spectrum that the unborn child hears in the womb.

So it's dark. And then, so I just open up the spectrum towards the end because that wakes you up, right? So people are awake. and they sort of huddle together. It's the sweet, it's the most beautiful thing. Beautiful. Really lovely. How many times have you performed it?

We've done 28. Putting it on is a big deal. Yeah. Is it difficult to set up with beds? No, the whole thing. You basically always need somebody who's fine to lose tons of money. You just need someone who's like, we're doing it. Because you can't have that many people.

No, right. I mean, we did one at Alexander Palace. We did three, nights or two nights there last year. And that venue is normally 10,000. And we did a thousand. Yeah. And then we're asking them to keep it open overnight for three days. So their costs are insane. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But... Have you ever done outdoors? Yeah, we did one in Grand Park in L.A. How was that? That was lovely, actually. We did two nights there in the summertime. It's lovely. We had, there's like two stages of that park,

aren't they? There's a path, and then it goes down. I think they sold, like, the first bid, I don't know, two, three thousand or something, but then people just came. Beautiful. It was really lovely. That sounds great.

It was great. Do you think of your music as spiritual? I think it really depends what you mean by that word. I mean, I would say that music is, it clearly has kind of magical properties of some kind, right? Because otherwise, why would we all love it so much?

And equally, why, you know, if you hear a piece of music, which you really don't like, why would it affect you so powerfully? Some tune just drives you crazy. Why does it drive you crazy? Same notes. Right. It's just air bouncing around, right?

Yeah, how could it be? So it's special in some way, yeah, definitely. What's the most beautiful place you've ever performed? I really love the Herodian at the Acropolis. in Athens. We've played a couple of times there. That's amazing. When is it 2000 years old? How much does your mathematical understanding of music impact what you write? I think the two go together, all of that academic stuff. It's not a conscious thing.

You know, it becomes just kind of part of your toolkit and it kind of sits behind the toolkit. And if I look at some of the things on, say, in the landscape, they break all the rules. totally break the rules all the time. I was in a gig the other day and I was playing at one of the string pieces, and it's got a, you know, like in Bath's time, you weren't allowed to write parallel fits, right? You couldn't because that was just bad

counterpoint. And I was just, I was playing it and I was like, there's a parallel fifth there. And I was like, yeah, but it's good, you know, it's kind of, it makes sense, right? And also it doesn't matter. It's like, it's a different thing. But it just kind of, I guess it just kind of sits behind things. For me,

it's always more about trying to find it the most direct, expressive way to kind of tell the story. That for me is like all I care about, and I'll use any tools to get there. Tell me about the different musical keys. There are keys that I will just go to, like on the piano if I'm looking for a particular feeling. People have maybe personal responses, you know, like, you know, famous. Obviously, all the Mozart D minor is like his kind of super sad key, and there's composers have different ideas.

Like for me, D minor is like, no, it's fine. You know, it's like medium sad. Whereas, you know, the more sort of black note keys, for me, are kind of, they feel richer. String players have like a different feeling about this because the instrument resonates differently, because they've got their open strings, which are whatever they might be, just tuned in fifths,

and those are, you know, white note keys. So those keys just feel their instrument rings more. But like a piece like on the nature of daylight, which is pretty much all black notes, the instrument doesn't resonate in the same way. So it has a special color because of that, you know, because the open strings are not helping. So it's only the notes. How is an acoustic piano different than a digital piano? It's a hundred percent different. I think a piano. A piano. A piano. A piano. A piano. A piano. A piano is because you hear it with your whole body. I mean, even just from a technical standpoint,

you know, MIDI is 128 velocities, and even if you sample them all, it's still contextual, you know, because like an E on the piano played with a C sounds different than if it's played with a B because they intermodulate, they talk to one another.

So you can't mimic that digitally. Like that piano is a big sonorous object, kind of a sculpture as well. You know, you play it and your whole body feels what it's doing. So, yeah, it's a totally different thing. When you work in the studio, do you work with speakers or headphones? Speakers always. I don't really like headphones.

How loud do you listen in the studio? Try to keep it vaguely sane. But you prefer it loud? I do like it loud, but I'm aware that it's unwise to play long-term, too loud. You know, there are some things with dynamics which you make mistakes if you're not playing at the right level. You can misjudge architecture. You can go, oh no, why is that so small? It should be, you know, why is that so big? It should be small, you know, this kind of thing. And so,

you know, for things that are going to be played loud, like say a big movie score, you know, you have to mix it kind of somewhere near where you're going to be because otherwise you'll just miscalculate. If you wear the writer hat, the performance, and the producer hat, are you thinking about all of them all the time? For me, it's a continuity, you know, I don't really see them as separate activities. You know, it's just making music. So the writer aspect of you cares about the reverb, for example. Oh, yeah, completely. Yeah.

And I see the studio as an instrument. You know, it is, it's a sculptural tool. It's a way to, first of all, investigate what you made and then present it in the best way. Tell me about the bass. I love base. I mean, subsonics and low end is huge for me. It's a big part of my work. I think there's something special about those frequencies.

I mean, in sleep, you have a lot of repeated low bass pulses. Usually with a lot of space between them, though. Yeah. And when the base comes in, you're usually shocked. Yeah, you're like, yeah, exactly. That comes from the kind of neuroscience thing in that you can use those to correlate or bring into alignment the audience's brainwaves, basically. So slow wave sleep can be, which is where we do our memory, consolidation and learning.

It can be kind of extended that slow wave period by. having repeated low frequency tones. And when I discovered this, I was like, thank you. Because that is what I want to be doing. Because I'd been working with this material. I really had. I was like, thank you, science. So I was able to write the music. I kind of wanted to write, which had this kind of this low frequency pulse. It's funny with that piece because like the BPM of that piece is 40. It's always like this. I go on the stage and I get a little click in, you know. And after the first click, I'm like, oh, is it broken? Like, where is the second click?

And then it's like, oh, no, it's really slow. But then what's weird is that by the end of the show, 40 is like, yeah, of course it is. It's like it's just moving along, you know. How would you say the sleep project changed your life? It changed in that a lot of people who, you know, were unfamiliar with my work, came to it from another space, you know, the space that sleep opened up, which is to do. with rest and different kind of focus and different engagement with music. Because I see sleep as a kind of a tool.

It's a piece with a function. You feel like your music pre-and-post sleep are different or no? Yeah, they probably are a bit different. I think with sleep, I pushed further into a space, which was kind of there before, like Blue Notebooks and Memory House. And there are like pre-echos of the language of sleep, but they aren't fully expressed. and they're not foregrounded.

But they're kind of always there, hovering around in the wings. And I think with sleep, it allowed me to just really push into that territory. And I think since then, you know, voices has kind of a similar, it's got some of that materiality in it, I think. I recently did a piece in Paris for, which is a lovely, such a nice project, which is not released yet. So this was commissioned by the Fondéant-Luiviton for their Rossell. Big Rosco show.

Beautiful. And we distributed the orchestra throughout the building. And there's some electronic music and vocal music. And I think that piece is the kind of next step in the kind of sleep language for me. But yeah, it's not out yet. How does the music change when you're looking at Rothko's paintings? Well, I mean, I love Roscoe. I mean, in fact, our first date with Yulieu, my partner, was to the Roscoe room in the Tate in London.

That he's been part of our lives for a long time. It was amazing being able to walk around a gallery, you know, hear the material, and the paintings are very generous. They hold your attention, but they're also, they're kind of not lecturing you, you know? It's... No narrative. They are extraordinary. And we had some, you know, great days where, because they closed the gallery for a day or

something when we were doing our, you know, soundtrack. So, you know, we'd play the piece and there'd be no one in the building. You could just walk around, seeing it's absolutely incredible. Wow. Yeah. It was really special. You explained? Different floors would have different pieces playing?

Yeah, so the piece is kind of a mobile. So you've got nine galleries from bottom to top in this building. Six of the galleries had musical ensembles who would sometimes be there and sometimes not. And if they weren't there, you'd have a recording? Well, there's electronic music as well. I see. So there's a load of Minimoog material. and then there is one ensemble of six cellos,

one ensemble of six vocalists, one of six violins. And those are being added to what's already playing. And it's all locked together. That's a beautiful idea. It's a lovely, lovely experience, and I had such fun making a piece. I like the also modular pieces where they can live in one way,

but if you want to add these extra pieces, you can. Yeah, it's like a web of materials. There's a long tradition of reading sacred text, slowly, allowing each word to settle, echo, and reveal meaning over time. Rather than rushing to conclusions, this practice invites reflection, listening, and attention. For centuries, this repetition has been used to stay close to wisdom. Not by studying words as information, but by receiving them as something lived and experienced over and over again.

This tradition is known as lectio divina. Emerging in early monastic life, it engages scripture through four gentle movements, reading, reflection, repetition, and rest. A short passage is read, a single phrase is held. Silence becomes part of the practice, creating space for insight to surface naturally. Lectio 365 brings that ancient rhythm into the present moment. Designed for modern life, it offers brief, guided, scriptural reflections throughout the day. To begin with intention, pause at midday, and wind down at night.

The readings are less about information gathering and more for returning to wisdom again and again, letting familiar words meet new moments. A modern way to keep biblical wisdom close, quietly present, steady, and alive within everyday life. Lectio 365 is a free resource. Find inspiration there, now and always. Learn more at lectio-365.com. If you're writing, using an instrument, how much would the particular instrument impact what you do?

Yeah, a lot. A lot. You sat in a different piano. Oh, yeah. No, they all have different personalities, don't they, in different colors? I mean, the piano, we were living in Berlin in our apartment. In the evenings, I would be just playing bits and bobs of sleep. and I think that piano has a lot to do with that piece. And it was just a second-hand upright. We got from a music school in Korea,

but it had a very nice dark sound because you're responding to the instrument, right? So you're making decisions according to the instrument. Yeah, it makes a big difference. Is it true of location as well? If you're in a different place, might you write something different? Yeah.

I mean, I think landscape is really important. It's funny because before, we built this studio. We were living in a rented place just because we'd moved back from Berlin and, you know, we would just kind of land it in the UK, so we just sort of rented this place. And my studio was a seven-foot

by seven-foot cube, you know, just like crammed. I was basically, I could touch the sides of the, you know, pretty much. And I was sort of worked away now. I made, like, did a load of movies, did, like, load of albums, you know. I was in there for about five years.

And I thought to myself, well, it doesn't really matter, because I'm just, you know, it's about what's going on here. But then actually it does matter because we are organic creatures. And being in the new space, we've been in there for five years, it makes a huge difference because I have, you know, air and daylight. And it sounds good. It's so special. Have you experimented with all these new synthesizers that are coming out all the time?

There are so many. It's like a wave. I know, it's like it's got mad, hasn't it? Yeah. First came to like the Euro rack wave, which I decided I wasn't going to do because I knew that if I started, I would just, my whole, you know, because it's just one more module, you know. And it's like, they call it Eurocrack, don't they?

It's just one more, just one more. I need another filter. I need another filter. So there's that. So I decided I was going to not do that. But then all these kinds of people like building scents at their kitchen table started happening. And yeah, there's just a lot of interesting stuff out there. What have been the biggest changes to music over the course of your lifetime?

I guess the first thing is the kind of effects of technology on the creative process, like the undo button, which just means people just making stuff all the time, la la la la la, la, undo, undo. And Pro Tools and the grid, the grid starts to kind of, you know, everything's on the grid, the click tracks, all of that stuff, huge different. Autotune, huge difference. Then you get the rise of streaming, the economics of that, the impacts on, you know, artists' ability to do what they can do from an economic standpoint. And now we've got the wonderful world of AI looming over us.

So it's a lot. Have you experimented with AI at all? I mean, I've had sort of dialogue with various people in that space. It's funny because they bring an industrial mindset to it. You know, it's about the output, it's about the product. While the product is important, it's not the most important. The most important thing is the kind of journey to that thing you're making and how it comes from your biography and how it comes from all the people you've met,

all the music you've heard and the you know of it. How you see the world. How you see the world. And I think that's what's so special about music, is it allows you to have a little glimpse into how someone else feels to be a part. You know, that's what's so special about it. And obviously, an AI system can kind of simulate a version of that. It can make things, but no point of view.

It's just following the instructions. No intentionality, no point of view, no. It's funny at this conversation with one of these guys. And they were saying, well, Max, how about this? You know, you've got an idea, right? You've had this idea at the beginning of your piece. And then you kind of get stuck, right? And they're like, well, that's where we come in.

come in, we'll do that bit for you, just like, plug it in and there'll be the, and I'm like, well, that's, that's the bit where I get stuck. That's what I'm after, I want to experience the struggle of like trying to figure it out. That's the magic. And you know, there are so many different solutions to that question. And settling for the one that a machine picks is an odd choice. Right. You might as well just like, why are you even bothering in the first place?

Yeah. Anyway. It feels like streaming has been good to you. It probably has in a way. I mean, like sleep, for example, is a piece which is people listen to a lot. It's streamed a lot. You know, there are downsides to streaming from the economic standpoint, definitely. And I think especially for emerging artists, it's very difficult, you know, to kind of cut through.

There is so much material up there. You know, people discover things, right? Because there's no risk. They just click through, they follow their enthusiasm and their things that they love and their affections. their affection, and they're like, oh, I love this. It doesn't matter where it came from, or it could be 40 years old, but they still love it, and suddenly there it is, you know. Yeah, I don't know if in the days of vinyl or CDs that your music could be as ubiquitous as

it is. Probably not. I feel like your music really has captured the culture. In a way, it's a funny thing, as a kid, you know, you go into a record shop and you've got your five pounds in your hands, you know, and you're going to buy an album, and you're going to buy an album and you maybe have heard about an album or you look at the cover and you like you, I would love to buy that album, but I'm just not going to risk it because it's five pounds. Yeah. You know, and it's like, so then you buy the one that you kind of know, the band that you love already and you just want to

get another of their albums. There isn't that risk to discovery. And I see it in, you know, the listening of my kid. I mean, their playlists are like all over the place. You know, it's just really interesting, sort of eclectic things you'd never even have heard of. I wonder also, There's an aspect of the music you make that lends itself to streaming. When I think of like a rock and roll 45, I don't think that's better streaming. Right. It's probably worse. In a way, yeah.

But for sleep, maybe streaming's good. Yeah. You know, if people use it overnight, it works. Yeah. Then I think with sleep, a lot of people have found other spaces for it in their lives. Like, you know, people use it as a workday. Basically, they sit down. press play, when the records finish, they're done.

Tell me the difference between an orchestra and electronic orchestration. Is there ever an argument for the electronic orchestration, or do you ever use them together? If I've written orchestral music, I will always record an orchestra. It's just so much better. They say that, you know, the demo sounds like an orchestra until you hear the orchestra. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Do you typically make a demo that is electronic? Well, I have to for movies.

Tell me about making music for movies. What's the process like? I prefer to read it and make material from the page. It's kind of an open space. But I think it also helps the filmmakers because it gives them what the atmosphere music could bring to it. Maybe they'll use it on the set or they use it in the early edits and this kind of thing.

And it just starts to become part of the texture of the world. So I like that. That isn't always possible, especially on bigger movies, which have more of like an industrial workflow. It's like, you know, here's the temp, take out the temp, now you do this, and six weeks later we'll see you at the mix.

It's a bit less satisfying, creatively. It can work. I mean, it can work. People make amazing music under those conditions, but it's more challenging, I think. I prefer something a bit more organic, a bit more one-to-one. You know, like with, I've just done last year, I did Hamnut with Chloe Zhao.

And that was just a, you know, one-to-one conversations. And really just felt like a very truly collaborative thing. How early were you involved in that one? Again, right at the beginning. I read it. We had lunch and we just talked through a bunch of stuff. And then I just said, well, I'm going to just write you some material off the page. And I made about, I don't know, about 40 minutes of things.

Would it be these are things that suit this story or this is what goes in this scene? This is how I see this world, kind of how I see it sounding divine. Of the overall piece. Yeah. Not this is the sound of the scene. Yeah, completely. Any shows coming up? I'm actually playing in Mumbai.

Wow. I'm really looking forward to it. How different is the reception in different parts of the world when you play? It's funny, like we really see it very explicitly with this leap show. You know, like in the UK, all the beds are like quite far apart, everything regimented. Like in Berlin, everyone climbed up on top of the subs and in the subs and they were sleeping in the subs. Wow.

Madrid, you know, it's just a big yoga mat with everyone just on a big yoga mat. In China, we did one at the Great Wall. I mean, it's a rural area. So there were music people, but they were like farmers. Yeah. And they brought their kids and they pushed the beds together and they were all just sleeping. It's amazing. That sounds great.

That show was crazy, actually, because it happened to coincide with some kind of important stake anniversary. So the security was insane around the venue, like armed guards, you know. So anyway, we start playing the show, and after I get two breaks in sleep, one around about two and a half hours and one, five or six hours, something like that. Anyway, so after my first break, I walk off stage, and I see all. all the armed guards just sleeping. I'm just lying on the ground with their guns.

It worked. So amazing. Really beautiful. Have you experimented with ancient instruments at all? I'm quite interested in medieval music, but it's a big kind of love of mine. So obviously there's all kinds of strange instruments which kind of hardly work at all, but are kind of incredible full of character. Do you ever use them in pieces?

I have used them in movies. I haven't used them in other things. so far. Would you say more as a sound effect or more as a actual musical element? Yeah, as music. I mean, I did a movie Mary Queen of Scots, so we used a lot of like Elizabethan materials and stuff in there. It's good fun. You've done things where you incorporate the ambient sounds of the spaces. Is it always intentional? No, I mean, it's there from the beginning of my work, really. It's, I mean, Memory House is full of that kind of stuff. And for me, you know, the music is sound and it's part of the continuum of sound.

And Cage influence, you sound. Right. Cage actually gets a little walk on on Memory House. I quote a bit of him reading, one of his texts. But we were just commenting just now about the extraordinary acoustic of this space. You know, so you've got the little bugs singing. But what's amazing is there's no rumble. Like the low end is completely wide open. Tell me about your experience at the Royal Academy.

There was like an orthodoxy, right? There was a thing, a way that you were supposed to write music if you're a serious, serious composer. And that was post-Boulaire's kind of atonal, serial-based kind of music, very complex, not approachable for the non-specialist. You know, it was like music as kind of a technical manifesto. That's odd. That seems more like the alternative, not the thing you would be taught in school. No, it really was.

It was like, if you write tonal music, then you're kind of an idiot, basically. Right. That was the deal. Strange. It was harsh. So, anyway, so I was kind of doing that because that's what I was supposed to do. But I, you know, I kind of increasingly just came to doubt the whole thing. And it was the time of, so we're talking about the end of the 80s, you know, all kinds of new tonal music was starting to happen.

I mean, I'd had my like teenage experience with Philip Glass and Terry Riley, which is tonal music in a different way, but it is. And then what was happening was that the music from the Baltics was starting to come over on ECM, so Arvopet especially. And I remember going to like the first performance of the Passio, which is this incredible, it's 90 minutes of, so it feels almost medieval in its construction. I remember just sitting there and going, I've got this all wrong. You know, there's something going on here, you know, rather than digging more and more into, like, complexity.

I was looking for something else, something more direct, more plain speaking, you know, just as a way to tell stories, like in a direct way. I just kind of decoupled, I guess, from the academy at that point. I went to Florence, actually, for a year after that. And I studied with Barrio. He was part of that modernist thing, but his music was much more omniferous. He did folk song music. He worked with like Schubert and old materials and the Beatles and all kinds of different stuff.

And it had this kind of plurality, and it was also about society. It was about the world. And I thought he was very inspiring for me. He just kind of made fun of all my very complicated music that I was presenting to him. And he was just a very credible genius. I mean, really visionary artist. And he could sort of, it was like he was reading my mind. You know, I would, you know, turn up with my thick score of like black ink everywhere.

And he would just be looking through it. And he could, and it's sort of crazy things, like impossible things. Like you'd be like, I know that should be a C. Schaunt and I'd be like, how does he know that? You know, he was like walking around inside my head. It was incredible. Yeah. But he basically just said, look, forget about this.

What is it you actually want to do? Why are you even here? Why are you doing this? And going back down to the fundamentals, you know. So that was, I guess, the sort of ultimately the thing that made me go, yes, I'm going to take away all of this complexity and all of this stuff. It's a tragic story for all the kids in school who went to music school because they loved music. Right, yeah.

Kind of anti-music. It was, well, yeah. I mean, Boulers, you know, who. who was the kind of godhead of that way of being was, if there's one who does that, it's interesting. You don't copy that. Right. Yeah, no, I agree.

I agree. There were two or three things that sort of made me just kind of go in a different direction. How did you end up with Barrio? He actually had taught at the Academy. He'd come for a couple of weeks and just done some master classes and stuff. And I loved his music anyway. So I kind of pestered his agent and wrote him a letter. And he just wrote me a letter saying, come on out.

That was incredible. And did he have a school? He did. He had an institute called Temporeale, which is in Florence in the city, above a fashion school. So it was all these guys doing fashion, and then on the top floor there would be this institute. What would a day in that class be like? First of all, it was very, very few and far between because he was like a global superstar composer. So he was not around very much.

But when I saw him, he basically would just look at the... whatever I'd been writing, he would poke fun at it. In a friendly way? In a friendly way. You know, I remember sending, bringing in one of this piano piece that I'd written. And there's a thing with student composers, especially pianists, that they write the incredibly hard piano piece. They do. It just is what happens. So I wrote my version of this incredibly hard piano piece. And he was looking at this piece and he was just like, this. And after a while, he says, he just looks up and he goes, Max, your piano piece. And he did this,

he made this gesture, this brilliant Italian gesture, which is just like, it's all just, just stop it now, stop it already, you know. So funny. I was just like, do you on some level find it inspiring? I mean, it's Berrio. So I guess that's the big thing I got from him because, you know, I couldn't really argue with him because he had such an extraordinary insight and vision and obviously, you know, an amazing composer himself. So it wasn't like I was going to say, no, you're wrong because he wasn't wrong. Would you say deadlines help you or undermine you? If I'm making my own record, then there is no deadline. Then I'm just working. But if I'm, if somebody's commissioned me to write a ballet or something and they need it at a certain time, then it's probably

the only way it's going to get done because I am actually, I sort of quite like doing nothing. Yeah. So if it weren't for the deadline, I probably would not get around to it in a way. Has there ever been a deadline that was a problem? They always feel like problems. But by the time you're done, you feel good. Yeah. There's usually a kind of a, it's impossible,

and then slowly you find a way to make it possible. Tell me the first time you heard the piece from Shutter Island where your instrumental had vocals added to it. You know, it was a sync request, essentially. It came in via my publisher. My publisher was, at that time, it was an amazing man called Andrew King, who ran mute

music song, which is the publishing album of mute records. He's a wonderful guy. He's a sort of English music business legend. He'd managed Pink Floyd at the beginning and all of these kinds of things.

He's a real character. So he's like, Mick, I'm going to send you something. He sends me this thing with Dinah Washington on Leche Delight. Do you tell you in advance when he was? You just listen to it called.

Yeah, and I was just like, I don't really, what's happening? What's happening? here, you know, it's because it's so, in a way, because I knew the dying Washington song, right, so I just couldn't quite believe that it fit together so well. Because this was a long time ago, they couldn't, like, just pitch-shift everything, and I thought it was kind of amazing. And I called the Mubbson, I think it's kind of amazing. And he's, I think it is, you know. I mean, also, having it having come via Robbie Robertson, who, you know, I loved a band, I love Dillon,

So, I mean, all of that was, that was like, for me, this is great. That's the first time I heard that piece of music was that version. I had no idea how it was made. And I didn't know the Dine Washington song. And I was thinking, this singer is picking notes that no singer I know would pick to sing over these chords. Exactly. It's kind of weird in a way. It made it better, not worse.

Exactly. It sounded so original. But it didn't work in any ordinary way. Exactly. I really took my breath away, and then I had to try to find it, and it wasn't easy to find because it wasn't clear what it even was.

Right. We actually, we've never done that live. We did it live once last year with Celeste doing their vocal, and that was lovely. Tell me something you believe now that you didn't believe when you were yellow. I have a sort of a faith in creativity

as a thing, as a force in the world, as a force in society. that in a way when I was younger, but I was sort of doing music maybe in spite of the fact that I was doubtful about its potential. It's quite hard to explain it. I feel more settled in music and music as a thing in the world now than I did when I was younger, even though I was always like passionately obsessed with it. Tetragrammatin is a podcast. Tetragrammatin is a website. Tetrogrammatine is a whole world of knowledge. Film, tetragamatim, beach culture, tetragrammatim, esoteric lectures, tetragmatim, off the grid living,

tetragamatin, alt, spirituality, tetragrammatin, the canon of fine objects, tetragrammatin, muscle cars, tetragrammatin, ancient wisdom for a new age. Upon entering, experience the artwork of the day. Take a breath and see where you are drawn.