An hour outside of London, among the soft rolling hills of Oxfordshire, the composer Max Richter and his wife, the artist Yulia Mahr’s creative practices take shape in Studio Richter Mahr (SRM), their purpose-built arts production space. Built on the grounds of a former alpaca farm (with a few alpacas still in residence), it incorporates spaces to record and write in, as well as a 32-acre farm that produces around 90 percent of their food.
“The garden was the first thing we set up before we built the studio,” says Yulia. “It was such an important part of the ethos of the place. There’s the connection that we have with gardening, and a real yearning to dig into food supply and eating well. How can we give that to people that work here and what difference does it make? It turns out a lot.”
Inspired by the Bauhaus, as well as the artistic community of the Black Mountain College, Max and Yulia have consciously worked to create a space that is not only built using largely organic materials and is carbon-neutral, it is also simpatico with their own working practices.
“Living in the country has changed my work,” explains Yulia; it takes shape in lens-based pieces and sculpture. “In my early work I was interested in human rights and man-made things, and now it’s almost the opposite. It’s very collaborative here, people get a lot of work done. We all start off with a passion for what we are doing and it’s beaten the hell out of you. And it’s rare to come across a thing that is joyous, so it’s like, OK let’s go back to that feeling and that creative impulse that we felt when we were young.”
Max’s latest album, In a Landscape, was written and recorded at SRM, and here he speaks with the designer Kim Jones, creative director of Dior Homme, who invited the composer to create the spellbinding catwalk music for his debut womenswear collection for Fendi in 2021, which was inspired by the gardens of Vanessa Bell, sister of Virginia Woolf.
With a shared love of literature, trash TV and nature, the pair struck up a fast friendship that has lead to a continual collaborative process – and the odd organically grown dinner.
Max: You’re the only person who’s sent me a clip of them being charged by a rhino this summer.
Kim: Ha!
Max: My language is music, but music is part of culture: literature, cinema, fashion, dance. These are things which flow together and speak to one another quite naturally. I think humans are storytelling creatures. We are interested in narrative. So for me it feels instinctively natural to be engaged in stories, and literature is one of their principal means.
MOL: Were there any particular stories that inspired the new album?
Max: One of the things I guess is the relationship between human beings and nature. Late and Soon is a line from Wordsworth. He writes this amazing line in 1802, where he says, “The world is too much with us; late and soon,/ Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.” So I took this idea of late and soon, which is the idea of something that is all around us but also too much. I feel like he was writing about social media.
Kim: I can’t imagine how you start a project. Music is something I admire so much but I would be terrible at doing.
Max: I am sure you find this, but partly you start a project and partly a project starts you. You have a thing that feels like it wants to be made. So there’s an unconscious part of you that’s already “doing something”. It takes hold of you.
Kim: Things come out of the air for me, and quite often it’s when I am listening to music. Music is quite a formative part of my work. And your music especially. It really puts me in a mindset to keep going. It becomes a background that you know so well it relaxes you, and becomes part of the process.
MOL: To Max’s point, Kim, your collections have a much more defined start and finish point. Do you have a place you visit to find inspiration or do you have a bank of future ideas?
Kim: I go through processes where I have ideas and I know they’re right for certain collections. I look at our plan and what things can lead on from each other. There’s an element of if I am working on a collection and something isn’t right, I’ll keep it for the next collection because I know it will fit really well in that. And I do like it to be a series and I think about the shows in chronological order, so they are linked together.
Max: You get a sense of things connecting across time to one and other. It’s not just a thing that is happening in that moment. It’s a thing that has a relationship to things you have done and will done.
MOL: You are who you are.
Kim: And you discover new things along the way that add in and add in.
Max: I think everyone has a basic fingerprint of everything they’ve read and everything they’ve seen and to some extent the work comes out of that. There’s always that flavour of that basic imprint and it’s how those things vary over time.
Kim: Do you ever not finish work and come back to it later?
Max: All the time. I have this idea that I always move forwards. If I am working on a piece and it’s not happening I’ll put it down and keep moving on something else. And then I’ll pick up a piece of paper from five years ago and can come at it with a different perspective and it can turn into something else. It’s a sort of composting process – it’s all just there, doing something.
Kim: I have a list of things, a pile of stuff. I’ve just tidied it actually, because I was looking for an idea that I wrote on a piece of paper two years ago.
MOL: It’s a very organic way of things coming to you. It’s a very elegant and natural way to let things happen.
Max: It’s also a way to utilise the passing of time. One of the problems I struggle with is developing an objectivity with your material, you get attached to your work and you want them to be certain ways, but it can’t always be that way. And there’s something about putting an idea down for months or years that when you come back to it, it feels like you didn’t make it. So you have a bit more freedom in how to handle that material.
Kim: We have such hard deadlines that when I finish a show I don’t really look at again. I find it hard to do interviews about collections I did six months ago – I’m seven collections ahead, so it gets confusing. I’m like: forward, forward, forward.
MOL: You finish the album, then tour. I guess you don’t have such a hard stop.
Max: It’s interesting. This album, I delivered last October. It’s had a long gestation, which is unusual for me, and I’ve done a lot of other things since delivering it. It’s almost like I am a different person making decisions in a different way, back then. So it’s interesting to witness that happen.
MOL: How do you know when something’s finished?
Kim: It’s finished when it can be finished. You have your show, you have your deadline and you know that is when the best possible outcome of what you’re able to do in that time can be done. I never think, oh I have done my best work, because I like to challenge myself.
Max: I agree. Whatever project it is, it’s pushed against the limits of whatever is containing it, whether it’s time, or circumstances, or usually it’s a time thing. At a certain point, it’s over. Time’s up. For me, I don’t mind that. If I didn’t have those constraints, I think I would keep going.
MOL: I’ve asked a lot of people this question and the majority of people say timing. If you didn’t have those time constraints, how would your work be different?
Kim: I don’t like doing big big collections because I think editing is important. I’d like to do less collections a year and work more on them, especially couture as you can really work on them.
Max: One of the privileges of doing creative work and having got to a level where you can establish your parameters is that you can concentrate on going deeper with it, which is very satisfying. I have a studio here, I can record things, and record it again if it’s not quite right. But that is the optimum process for me. A deadline is something that stops that. I don’t think I’ve ever done anything without a deadline.
MOL: Tell me about your working relationship.
Kim: When I started at Fendi and was thinking about the timeline of 1925-1928, I found a book of Vanessa Bell’s paintings, and then was thinking about the Bloomsbury Group and thinking about taking something from London to Rome, as the start of what I was going to do. I was listening to Woolf Works a lot, and I DM’d Max and asked him to work on it with me. It’s very easy to work with Max; he goes off and does it and it’s always perfect. There’s a synergy where we understand each other without saying very much.
Max: What I appreciate about the way you work is that it feels conversational. It’s not like some kind of architectural process.
Kim: I feel privileged I can work with people I admire so deeply. You learn so much when you collaborate. It makes you think in a different way.
I’m very lucky that my group of friends is so broad and diverse. But that’s what makes it interesting. My life is always about the past, the present and the future. Everything I consider: the past, I think of the present and I think of the future. As a designer you look at the past, which is the DNA of the house, and you think what’s happening now and you think what’s going to happen in the future.
MOL: Do you think that’s applicable to music, Max?
Max: Musical is a historical language, it’s all made in relation to other music. It’s a weird organism that inhabits us and we inhabit. Every bit of music I write has been influenced by the way someone else wrote it. In the same way every guitar band is a version of the Kinks or the Stones or the Beatles. Music is also asking questions, what if theories about what comes next.
Kim: I like Max’s techno influences, which I think a lot of people don’t know about.
MOL: Do you have any secret love of like… funky house or whatever.
Max: I’ve always listened to a broad range of things but when I’m at home I listen to a lot of dub. Like King Tubby, Studio One, Kingston dub. It’s a wonderful way to pass through time.
Kim: I love Abba. Whenever we’re getting a bit slow in the studio we put Abba on. It lifts everyone up.
MOL: Tell us about your album, Max, it’s so beautiful.
Max: I guess the big idea of the record is trying to find the musical space that reconciles polarities. Electronic music, instrumental music, the natural world, the human world, and then these found objects, these life studies between the tracks. And that’s a way for me to talk about polarisation as a thing, which is huge in our society right now. People are so far apart. I guess the record is a small plea for reconciliation between these extremes that we are living with. And I think that is something creativity can do.
MOL: Kim, do you see similar motifs in your work? Fashion can be so political too.
Kim: I just want to evoke positivity. Fashion does bring people together and it’s normally the outsiders, who are the more interesting people. And I think that is what’s interesting for young kids, who don’t feel like that, that it’s a piece of hope for them. I knew as a kid that I didn’t want to be Kim Jones who worked in a bank.
Max: When I put your clothes on, it makes me feel amazing.
Kim: I hate the term armour, but you make someone feel good about themselves. Fashion’s not shallow, it’s got depth.
Photography assistant: Cecilia Byrne. Grooming: Olivia Cochrane. Post: Simon Thistle.