Infra

Infra extends a 25-minute score Richter wrote for a Royal Ballet collaboration with the choreographer Wayne McGregor and the artist Julian Opie, staged at the Royal Opera House in 2008. Opie's video projections of everyday scenes ran behind the dancers. The theme is the 2005 London bombings, and Richter drew on Schubert's Winterreise, T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land and the texts of Wilhelm Müller. The album artwork comes from the ballet backdrop on 11 November 2008.

It was recorded at Air Studios in October 2009, mixed at Studiokino and Trixx in Berlin, and mastered at Black Saloon Studios in London. Pitchfork's Joe Tangari heard it as night music and picked out Infra 7, where the strings are electronically processed to a hollow, glassy tone. Pitchfork called it achingly gorgeous, and Metacritic gives it 77 from 14 reviews. It was reissued by Deutsche Grammophon on 25 April 2014.