Episode 200: Max Richter

28:45When you have something you like on paper, do you always know how you want it to translate to instruments? Yeah, I'll be usually, I'll be thinking of like, oh, this is going to be whatever, strings or something, 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 it does the thing which violinists hate doing, which is play fifths.

29:28it'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 performers themselves i was talking with a friend of mine about this the other day and 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 emotionality maybe the blue notebooks is like that in a way.

30:25They're also about the world we live in, you know, society. Again, that record is, you know, comes out of the Iraq war conflict or a piece like Voices, which is, you know, the universal declaration. So it's that sort of dialogue between like an interior, if you like, journey or asking questions about meaning, but also about how we connect in the world and what culture, what creativity can do in society. Because I believe in music. I do, right? I do believe in its ability to kind of just elevate us. Even sad music. Sure. Brings us together. Absolutely. Yeah. And even, you know, in a tiny way, you know, if 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.

31:11My day's a tiny bit better. It's like 1%. Some days more. Some days more. But, you know, even that little, that tiny thing, I just feel like it's a very valuable 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. 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.

31:52It'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, Es Devlin, who's a wonderful... I love her. She's great, right? She's great. She designed a very beautiful kind of lighting installation that we play in.

32:31And basically, the gigs are mostly in surround.

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34:39Is 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. you know 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 a starting point for me Purcell I love Schubert Mahler Stravinsky and then in pop music and electronic music.

35:28Big moment for me was hearing Autobahn when I was a kid. That was huge. Because I didn't... 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 bass line, you know, when that bass line starts, I was just like, what is this? You know, because I was 13. I didn't know electronic music. And I went on this kind of almost like a quest to discover it. So, 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? You know, put a stamp on it, took it to a post box, waited six weeks, got a letter back.

36:07It's Cartwright, Autobahn. So I was like, so I saved up my pocket money, got on the bus, went to the record store, Autobahn, came back, dropped the needle on the thing. And I was just like transfixed. It's like, what are these sounds? So then the next thing is I pestered 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 kits. So you could literally build a synth from a kid. I got one of these things and just spent weeks and weeks of the soldering on, built this thing in my bedroom. Started to just be able to listen to those sounds and work with those sounds.

36:46Do 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, an electrical engineer, mechanical engineer. He was like, that's a live wire. You're going to die if you leave. 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. It's a synth, actually. It's a thing called a Transcendent 2000, which is designed by a guy called Tim Orr, who designed the Oscar and some other quite eminent synths, you know.

37:27And there's a few people who built this kit, like Thomas Dolby built one. The guy from New Order, the producer of New Order, I've forgotten his name, he also built one. And actually a lot of, like, Blue Mondays, like Transcendent 2000. No one had any money, right? So it was like, let's all build the kit. So weirdly, all around the place are 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.

38:01And, you know, I'd have got into recording way sooner. But it was really expensive. Well, everything was so expensive at that time, you know. 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 Mahler 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, he's more like an inventor. But I love his whole openness and perspective on things. I mean, Brian had a big influence on Brian Nino had a big influence on me.

38:41You know, as a kid, you know, discreet music, music for airports, those were foundational. You know, I really was like, uh, okay. A different way of hearing, a different way of being. Laurie Anderson, Meredith Monk. Yeah, I love Meredith Monk. Oh, she's a genius, you know, incredible. Earlier you said that you have worked with Schubert's music. Right. Can you play 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.

39:22And 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 Winterreise. So, and it has this lovely tune.

39:45You know, it has this, 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 so that's a gorgeous bit of Schubert and I thought okay so what I'm going to do is because this piece has a kind of a darkness about it So instead of it being G flat, major. So I made this piece infra three.

40:45Totally transformed. So basically it takes like Schubert's atoms and kind of just turns the lights down on it. This melody that he has in his piece.

41:04That's, he gets that from Beethoven, gets that from Beethoven seven.

41:14Yeah, 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 referring to the Beethoven as well. When you play them in a row, I could see how it becomes unrecognizable because the mood is so different. Yeah, because the infra's got a kind of, it's like, it's sort of searching. It's like... You know, that's sort of somber. Whereas, you know, it's Schubert, right? That's his.

41:56I mean, that's just pure gold for me. I mean, I just love that so much, but that's a kind of obvious example, clear one. 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, she works in visual art. So she has a 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.

42:41You 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 and soul stealing. Yeah. I mean, our live room, 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.

43:21Yeah, 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 Abbey Road and it's a box. Yeah. But a lot of things have to be in 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'm in there 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, drink cups of tea quietly, that kind of thing.

44:03What's your meditation practice? So I have a Zen practice. I studied with a wonderful teacher, Thich Nhat Hanh, in the end of the 80s. So how old were you at the time? Mid-20s. It's a sort of classic moment when you're searching, 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 day-to-day, you know, in a way. I mean, it underlines 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.

45:20Tell 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, within classical music criticism, there's a kind of suspiciousness about things which are 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.

46:11Yeah, it is ridiculous. But, you know, that is literally what, you know, like Boulot has said, you know, you want 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 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 you know yes and even if it's dealing with a serious or difficult subject matter.

46:57I agree. I 100 % agree. And I think it's interesting because actually, our hang-up, I would say, comes from sort of the Western canon. You know, this isn't 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 start to get elaborations of the plain chant, and that leads to kind of art music in the Renaissance.

47:43In 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 Macho, 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 Western classical music in a big way, all the way to Bach.

48:27And then slowly, I guess, as the sort of 17th, 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, Wordsworth from the lake, you know, all this kind of stuff. of, I guess, you'd say Schubert, Schumann, all of these people. And then it, you know, in the 20th century, everything evaporates.

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50:31How 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 baltics in like sibelius you know it becomes 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, folk song collectors. So recording folk songs and then they get used.

51:16Like in England, you get Vaughan Williams and Delius and those kind of people. In Hungary, Bartók famously, you know, uses folk song. So they become like a resource. If you hear a French composer versus a Hungarian composer, So 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 Foray, like Ravel, all of these.

51:57And it has this kind of sensuous color, you know? It's about that. Going back to Bartók, Hungarian music. Hungarian music, a lot of it is derived from folk rhythms. So it's kind of got a spikier texture. Asymmetrical rhythms, fives and sevens and these kinds of things. 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.

52:47I 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, it was fashionable to be Italian. So Italian music had this kind of, in a way it was kind of hip. English music maybe had more formality about it, possibly. Remove 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.

53:31Wow. 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. But, you know, so it always had this kind of draw, you know, the magical self, you know, all the bit. 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 play it on the piano?

54:08Yeah, that's interesting, isn't it? I mean, there are some amazing arrangements of organ music. There's a beautiful arrangement of a couple of Bacharach 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. and you can't use your feet. So it's a bit of a process. What was the first time you ever played in front of people? Well, I mean, I played at university, you know, in little university gigs. I was cripplingly nervous, so nervous.

54:47The first orchestral piece that anyone ever played of 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. Did you go to rehearsal? Yeah, I went to rehearsal, yeah. But for the premiere, I was just 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. 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?

55:32It 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 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.

56:10It 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.

56:54In 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.

57:41It just is. And are all the little pieces of music in your head familiar to you? Were there any that maybe are 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 in the day.

58:17And 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, doing 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. Do you actively research for a project?

58:56I 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 deck. 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, right?

59:33So I've got these voices. So those kinds of things, you know, I— Can you play an example of that? Okay, so the kind of main spine of Mad Adam is based around this— this line

59:57just carries on like that so it's a falling thing 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 are like they're engineered, you know, they're there. And there's a lot of other kind of code in the books. But so they sing a lot, this material.

1:01:03So it's, there's a lot of music of this sort in there, and 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 I and Act II 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?

1:01:47Fill out this questionnaire. So I filled out my questionnaire and it came up, poet or gardener. Yeah. And your both turned out you're both. That's right. I'm both of those things. You're a poet and a gardener at the piano. Exactly. I garden at the piano every day, yeah. 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 Abbey Road because my parents had it. And it was considered, in a way, too strong a medicine for a young kid. They wouldn't play me Abbey Road. They would hear it, but it was like, oh, no, no, that's far too, you know.

1:02:33But 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 the 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. Yeah. 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 it goes to Pro Tools.

1:03:14But 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, you know. 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.

1:03:57there's a piece called Lullaby for the West Coast Sleepers which I recorded in a beautiful place up on the west coast of Scotland Crea which is like this art centre and they've got a fantastic piano we were there staying there with the kids this is a long time ago and I was just like I'd just love to just go and play that piano you know 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.

1:04:32But, 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.

1:05:06If 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 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 we've got actually at the studios, which has been really interesting, is we have this Spirio piano, which is, you know, this recording piano that can play itself. That's Steiner 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.

1:05:49You know, when you're hearing, you're also 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. Exactly, yeah. And you could change the sound in the... Exactly. Or I could say, oh no, I need to play quieter or louder or different. That's beautiful. Yeah, it's an amazing, amazing instrument. Do you tend to do a lot of takes? Not really. And do you mainly listen to vinyl? Yeah. Yeah, at home I... It's interesting because the studio, obviously, It's an Atmos room with like big ATCs everywhere. You know, it sounds super accurate.

1:06:25At home, I've got like a quite dark sounding valve amp, big old tanois, vinyl, because it's a different thing. You know, I just want, at home, I want vibes. I don't want like accuracy. I just want like good vibes, which that does.

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1:08:24What 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 of it. And then, yeah, some of the, like, half-track 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.

1:08:59Yeah, so we all got into that, and that was fun. What 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.

1:09:46What 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.

1:10:30Maybe 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 like 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 basically try and sleep.

1:11:06Basically, 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 Julia 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. And so Yuli was, we were living in Berlin at the time. So it was like 4 a.m. or something. And 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.

1:11:41It'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 asleep 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?

1:12:21So 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.

1:13:01We 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. 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 you know and like the subs in sleep it's like a massage right 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.

1:13:54And 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. Yeah. You just need someone who's like, we're doing it.

1:14:37Because you can't have that many people there. 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 but it's really special outdoors yeah we did one in grand park in la 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 on there there's like and there's a path and then it goes down. I think they sold like the first bit, I don't know, two, three thousand or something.

1:15:22But 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, happy to be.

1:16:00So it's special in some way. Yeah, definitely. What's the most beautiful place you've ever performed? I really love the Herodian Theater at the Acropolis in Athens. We've played a couple of times there. That's amazing. When was it, 2 ,000 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.

1:16:43I was in a gig the other day and we were playing it, one of the string pieces, and it's got, you know, like in Barth'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. 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 the most direct, expressive way to kind of tell the story.

1:17:17That 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, famously all the Mozart D minor is like his kind of super sad key and 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.

1:18:08And 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, 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 100 % different. I think a piano is because you hear it with your whole body. I mean, even just from a technical standpoint, MIDI is 128 velocities, and even if you sample them all, it's still contextual, because an E on the piano played with a C sounds different than if it's played with a B because they intermodulate.

1:18:59They 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.

1:19:46You 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 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 performer hat 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.

1:20:29Oh, 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 bass. I love bass. 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. Because when the bass 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.

1:21:27So 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. You've been given permission. 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 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?

1:22:06Like, 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. How would you say the Sleep Project changed your life? It changed in that a lot of people who 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 a 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. Do you feel like your music pre and post sleep are different or no?

1:22:48Yeah, 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 were like pre echoes 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 that in Paris for which is a lovely such a nice project which is not released yet but so this was uh commissioned by the fondation louis vuitton for their roscoe big roscoe show beautiful and we distributed the orchestra throughout the building and there's some electronic music and vocal music and and i think that piece is the kind of 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 rothco's paintings well i i mean i love roscoe I mean, in fact, our first date with Yule, my partner, was to the Rothko room in the Tate in London.

1:24:03He's been part of our lives for a long time. It was amazing being able to walk around the 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. They're no narrative. They are extraordinary. And we had some, you know, great days where, because they would close 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. And you could just walk around, seeing it's absolutely incredible. Wow. Yeah, it was really special.

1:24:39Could you explain? 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 Mini Moog material, and then there is one ensemble of six cellos, one ensemble of six vocalists, one of six violins. And those would be added to what's already playing. Yeah, and it's all locked together. That's a beautiful idea.

1:25:16It's a lovely, lovely experience, and I had such fun making that piece. I like the idea also of 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.

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1:27:49If you're writing using an instrument, how much would the particular instrument impact what you do? Yeah, a lot, a lot. If you sat at a different piano. Oh, yeah. No, they all have different personalities, don't they, and 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 secondhand 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.

1:28:29Yeah, 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 the studio, we were living in a rented place just because we'd moved back from Berlin and 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. I was basically, I could touch the sides of the, you know, pretty much. And I was sort of worked away in there. I made like, did a load of movies, did like a load of albums, you know.

1:29:07I 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. You know, 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 gone mad, hasn't it? Yeah. First came like the Eurorack 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?

1:29:55It'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 synths 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. It just means people just making stuff all the time, la, la, la, la, la, undo, undo, undo. and Pro Tools and the grid.

1:30:32The grid starts to kind of, you know, everything's on the grid, the click tracks, all of that stuff, huge difference. Auto-tune, 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.

1:31:16The 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 and all the music you've heard and the units 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 person. 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 instructions. No intentionality, no point of view.

1:31:53It's funny, I had this conversation with one of these guys, And they were saying, well, Max, how about this? You know, you've got an idea. 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. We'll do that bit for you. Just, like, plug it in. And I'm like, well, 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.

1:32:31Right. You might as well just like, why are you even bothering? Because it's nothing. 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 affection they're like oh I love this you know 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.

1:33:27In 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 maybe have heard about an album or you look at the cover and you're like, 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, you 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 hear 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 if there's a aspect of the music you make that lends itself to streaming when i think of like a rock and roll 45 yeah i don't think that's better streaming.

1:34:16Right. 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 will use it as a work day. Basically, they sit down, press play. When the record's finished, 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.

1:34:54They say that, you know, the demo sounds like an orchestra until you hear the orchestra. It's like not even close. 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 of music could bring to it. You know, and maybe they'll use it and they'll play it on the set or they'll use it in the early edits and, you know, this kind of thing. And it just starts to become part of the texture of the world.

1:35:29So I like that. That isn't always possible, especially on bigger movies, which have more of like an industrial workflow it's it's like you know here's the temp take out the temp now you do this and you know 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 with um i've just done last year i did hamlet with with chloe Xiao. And that was just a, you know, one-to-one conversations and really just felt like a very truly collaborative thing.

1:36:11How 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. The feeling 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.

1:36:52How different is the reception in different parts of the world when you play it's funny like we we really see it very explicitly with the sleep shows you know like in the uk all the beds are like it's very quite far apart everything regimented and yeah 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 and 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.

1:37:29It's amazing. That sounds great. That show was crazy actually because it happened to coincide with some kind of important state 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 the armed guards just sleeping. They're just lying on the ground with their guns. It worked. Sleeping. So amazing. Really beautiful. Have you experimented with ancient instruments at all?

1:38:12I'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 an actual musical element? Yeah, as music. I mean, I did a movie, Mary Queen of Scots, so we used a lot of Elizabethan materials and stuff in there. It's good fun. You've done things where you incorporate the ambient sounds of the spaces.

1:38:46Is it always intentional? No, I mean, it's there from the beginning of my work, really. 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 influences. 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 bass. 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 boulay'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.

1:39:51That's odd. That seems more like the alternative, not the thing you would be taught in school. No, it really was. It was like you have to, you know, 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.

1:40:36And then what was happening was that the music from the Baltics was starting to come over on ECM. So Arvo Pert especially. And I remember going to like the first performance of the Passio, which is this incredible, it's 90 minutes of, it feels almost medieval in its construction. And 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. you know 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 omnivorous He did folk song music.

1:41:34He worked with like Schubert and old materials and, you know, 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 he would, crazy things, like impossible things.

1:42:13Like you'd be like, I know that, that should be a C sharp. And I'd be like, I absolutely know that. You know, it was like walking around inside my head. It was incredible. 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.

1:42:49Right, yeah. Kind of anti-music. It was, well, yeah. I mean, Boulez, you know, who was the kind of godhead of that way of being, was if there's one who does that, it's interesting. Yeah. 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 Berio? He actually had taught at the academy. He'd come for a couple of weeks and just done some masterclasses 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.

1:43:23It was incredible. And did he have a school? He did. He had an institute called Tempo Reale, 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'd 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 whatever I'd been writing. He would poke fun at it. In a friendly way? In a friendly way. You know, I remember bringing in one of this piano pieces that I'd written.

1:44:07And there's a thing with student composers, especially pianists, that they write the incredibly hard piano piece. They do. It just is what happens. And 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 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. Did you on some level find it inspiring? I mean, it's Berrio. Yeah. So I guess that's the big thing I got from him.

1:44:51Because, you know, I couldn't really argue with him. Because he had such an extraordinary, like, 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 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.

1:45:34So 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. and my publisher was, at that time, an amazing man called Andrew King who ran Mute Song, which is the publishing arm of Mute Records.

1:46:21He's a wonderful guy. He's a sort of English music business legend. You know, 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 Nature Daylight. Did he tell you in advance what he was? No, no, no. You just listened to it correctly? 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 Dine in Washington song, so I just couldn't quite believe that it fit together so well.

1:46:55Because 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 him up and said, I think it's kind of amazing. And he said, I think it is. know i mean also have it having come via robbie robertson who you know i loved the band i love dylan so i mean all of that was that was like for me it's 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 great way yeah it made it better not worse exactly it sounded so original yeah but it didn't work in any ordinary way exactly it 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 that was lovely tell me something you believe now that you didn't believe when you were young i have a sort of a a faith in creativity as a thing as a force in the world as a force in society and that in a way when i was younger but i was sort of doing Doing music maybe in spite of the fact that I was doubtful about its potential.

1:48:27It'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 passionately obsessed with it.

1:48:52Thank you.

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