CHRISTIAN RICHET
Kosmiche traveller harnesses celestial energy on his latest recording.
MUSICAL PRODIGY CHRISTIAN Richet enjoyed a classical training but it was discovering Pink Floyd’s Ummagumma in his dad’s record collection that provided him with the musical epiphany that set him on his way:
“It’s the record I would take to a desert island,” he says.
He grew up in Eaubonne on the northern outskirts of Paris during the 1970s and learned piano from the age of seven. Once he reached his teens, Richet enrolled in piano and percussion at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique. When not creating percussive dreamscapes, he now teaches music professionally.
But growing up in France, the young Richet had little time for ‘popular’ artists like Jean-Michel Jarre or disco king Cerrone – instead he tapped into something profound when he discovered Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze, Heldon and other kindred, kosmische travellers. Since 1989, Richet has been harnessing celestial energy in the form of eight exquisite electronic albums.
“For me, Tangerine Dream were always way ahead of everyone else,” Richet confirms. “I love that classic composition style where you work on a theme or a motif with all the possibilities that engenders, all these incredible sequences, these fabulous musical and dreamlike landscapes.”
As well as Edgar Froese and co, he has a deep love for King Crimson and the percussive thunder of Bill Bruford (“the absolute drummer”), as well as Miles Davis, Kraftwerk and Olivier Messiaen. It’s this eclectic mix of the elaborate, jazzy and futuristic that drives Richet’s mostly instrumental work.
His most recent album, Two Visions Of Unreal Worlds, evokes the Aztecs in an instrumental track called Aztlan.
Split into two parts, the second half is 23 minutes long and driven by a percussive marimba-like ostinato held together by atmospheric cries from other instruments, including a soaring guitar by his friend and teaching colleague, Moulay Ait Si Ahmed.
Richet has maintained a similar sonic aesthetic throughout his body of work, with the biggest changes coming from the technology, starting with a Revox tape machine and an 8-track Fostex in the 80s, then onto DAT, and now finally a computer. “I have almost endless possibilities to find a solution,” he says,“but you can become a slave to technology. My motto is always: amaze me’” Richet applies this need to be amazed to the compositions he listens to, and the ones he writes himself. It’s a benchmark, which has limited the amount of releases he’s sired, but each one is a hermetic world, timeless and easy to get lost in.
“I don’t think that my music is meditative, though,” he says. “It’s certainly an interior experience but it’s also percussive, punctuated with dreamlike atmospheres, characteristic of my style.”
And the one thing Richet is most proud of these last three decades? “Just keeping going,” he says, “facing a wall of indifference. Composing is a pleasure, a passion and a drug, but promoting, sending emails, chasing people… it’s exhausting and time consuming. But, alas, many artists are obliged to do that today.”
“I LOVE THAT CLASSIC COMPOSITION STYLE WHERE YOU WORK ON A THEME OR A MOTIF WITH ALL THE POSSIBILITIES THAT ENGENDERS.”