His crime? Playing jazz in the practice room. The very notion of mixing your musical influences was frowned upon back then. “Oh yeah. Very much so,” Richter admits. “That was verboten, that stuff.”

Richter must have been a poor pupil then. According to his MySpace page, the music he makes sounds like all of the following: Henry Purcell, Sigur Ros, Philip Glass, Schubert, Schumann, Arvo Part, John Cage and the Boards Of Canada. And that’s me paraphrasing.

The blending of modern and classical, acoustic and electronic, is there for all to hear on the soon to be re-released debut album Memoryhouse on Fat Cat Records (the Brighton-based label that’s home to The Twilight Sad, Frightened Rabbit and We Were Promised Jetpacks, among other cool names to drop). It’s a rich romantic thrill of a record, minimal in approach yet maximal in emotional impact. It’s as gorgeous as

Scarlett Johansson, as a Pedro Almodovar movie, as Venice maybe.

For Richter, of course, it’s part of his past. Well, sort of. “When I was sitting down to remaster it, I felt like I’d just made it,” he says. “I felt very connected to it. I suppose it’s a catalogue of my obsessions. It’s one long rant about stuff I’ve found.” By that I take it he means his interest in Europe, in poetry, in place. Would that more rants sounded like this.

Today, Richter is sitting in his studio in Berlin, surrounded by piles of junk (which is his natural habitat, he admits), getting ready to go off and pick up his kids from school. Although he was born in Germany, he was brought up in the UK and only moved to the German capital last year. His kids are fluent German speakers already. He’s not. Have his new surroundings had an impact on the music he makes? “I don’t think so. It mostly happens in a made-up world anyway. The real world is there, but it’s not the main thing. It’s all going on in your head, I think.”

Richter’s music is a reflection of all the musical influences that have gone on in his head. He received a classical music education, studying in Edinburgh, at the Royal Academy in London and even in Florence under

Italian composer Luciano Berio. But at the same time he was listening to the experimental and electronic music emerging in the late 1970s and early 1980s. “Like everyone else, I was just buying records and listening to stuff. John Peel was the other source of music education really.”

He formed and played with six-piece ensemble Piano Circus for a number of years, more Reich than rock. “We played a lot of American minimal music which kind of connects in some ways to electronic music and techno because it’s all about systems. And I suppose that was the beginning of me starting to put it together. Around that time I did work for the Future Sound of London as well, and that was another connection, I suppose.”

He recorded Memoryhouse in 2002 for Radio 3’s Late Junction label (now resting in peace). In the years between then and now, he has made other albums, worked as a producer for folk singer Vashti Bunyan, managed to entice the likes of Tilda Swinton and Robert Wyatt to perform on his records, and written music for films. Last year he was introduced to a wider public when his score for the Israeli animated documentary Waltz With Bashir won a European Film Award. The fact that the film itself was later nominated for Oscars and Baftas also increased his profile outside of the music world.

“Film music isn’t the same as listening music,” he says. “It can’t be, really. There’s got to be room for the film. So it’s like a kind of alchemy. You’re bringing something to these images and to the story that’s in the pictures and in the script, and just trying to make it all glow a bit more and catch fire. It’s a really weird one because you never quite know what’s going to work.

“It’s like doing a Rubik’s cube -- which I’ve never managed to do. It’s like doing a puzzle, looking for that thing where it all sticks together and suddenly you’ve got more than you had before.”

It gets him out of the house too. “Most of my work is just me sitting in a room, and the great thing about film is you get to have conversations with people. It’s a really nice balance to that very solitary scribbling away.”

Richter is currently recording a score he wrote for a ballet last year, writing the soundtrack for a new Hungarian film, waiting to see if there’s a track of his on the new Martin Scorsese movie Shutter Island (“I’ll believe it when it’s on the screen”) and nearly getting knocked down while he’s talking to me on the phone as he goes to get his kids from school.

The last music he listened to was Monoliths and Dimensions, the latest album by American experimental death metallers Sunn O. The next, he says, will be something by Orlando Gibbons, the English Jacobean composer. He’s thankfully still a poor pupil still. Nothing is verboten. Nothing at all.

  Memoryhouse is released by Fat Cat Records on Monday.

 

To listen to two tracks from Max Richter’s re-released Memoryhouse album -- solo piano piece The Twins (Prague) and powerful orchestral work Last Days, click on the links at the top right-hand side of this article.