Memoryhouse

Memoryhouse came out in 2002 on Late Junction, a short-lived label wing of the BBC 3 programme of the same name. Richter has said he wrote it for his own peace of mind, and that recording his music with an orchestra for the first time seemed a crazy thing to happen. The idea came from a 1994 trip to Lantau island, where a Zen monastery gate carried the words "Time does not exist. What is memory?".

It is documentary music about real and imagined histories. Sarajevo, November, Arbenita and Last Days deal with the aftermath of the Kosovo conflict, and Laika's Journey with childhood memory. John Cage's voice appears, and there are readings from the poet Marina Tsvetaeva. Pitchfork heard Richter weaving electronics against the orchestra, noting that Last Days is a symphonic crescendo with low brass and percussion, that Garden (1973)/Interior builds a drone behind Cage reading his poems, and that Lines on a Page (One Hundred) Violins lasts 83 seconds.

Andy Gill called it a landmark work of contemporary classical music, and BBC Music a masterpiece in neoclassical composition. FatCat reissued it in 2009 and 2014, and the 2014 vinyl reissue coincided with Richter's first live performance of it, at the Barbican on 24 January 2014. Pitchfork reviewed that reissue.