How Max Richter Brought His Sonic Landscape to Very Fancy Skin Care

“I find there’s something very relaxing about thinking of bigger time scales—this concept of deep time,” composer Max Richter says in a La Prairie film teasing his recent collaboration with artist Nobuhiro Nakanishi. “If you rewind the clock 100 million years, or fast-forward 100 million years: You know, the concept of eternity, it feels very calm.”

It’s certainly a moment—either twisted or refreshingly apropos—to reconsider time. The anniversary of the pandemic has just passed, marking a year in which everyone’s lives have been unmoored from their usual rhythms. Still, the metronome ticks on. The first day of spring arrives this weekend. Birthdays, if we’re lucky, continue apace. The patina of everyday wear—brows furrowed into screens—is progressing as expected. 

If only we could emerge from our quarantine bubbles in mint condition, like dolls sold on eBay preserved in their original boxes. But La Prairie has spent nearly a century concocting ways to facilitate that kind of cellular-level rehabilitation—if not quite quite adding years to life, at least “adding life to years,” as the company’s founder, Swiss physician Dr. Paul Niehans, once put it.

La Prairie is skin care to the nth degree. The brand has built its core lines around extra-rarefied, extra-extra ingredients (caviar, gold), with packaging that sits in hand like hefty jewel-like baubles. (Refills for the sake of less waste are on the horizon.) At the microscopic level, its patented complexes suggest the rev of a race car’s engine. This is what’s in store with the latest launch: a month-long skin reboot called the Haute-Rejuvenation Protocol. Part of the Platinum Rare collection, the formula (housed in three 10-day vials) includes signaling molecules that act as growth factors, encouraging a fortification of the skin’s extracellular matrix. It’s designed to reactivate biological processes that help maintain bouncy, radiant skin, like a conductor keeping the violins and oboes in sync. And it’s an auspicious time for a deluxe reanimation from within, as people wait out the last tail of hibernation, gearing up for re-entry. 

A different kind of rarefied animation also accompanies the launch. La Prairie—a champion of the arts, lately though its work with Fondation Beyeler on the conservation of Piet Mondrian paintings, and its support of the MoMA PS1’s new Niki de Saint Phalle retrospective—put Richter and Nakanishi in dialogue for Eternal Circle (2020). Conceived as a continuous loop, the video piece shows Nakanishi’s tiny, freehand line drawings as they suggest a passing mountainscape, the peaks and valleys ticking by like a heart-rate monitor; Richter’s original score, “Platinum,” provides the enveloping background. If tapping a celebrated composer seems unexpected for a beauty brand, it’s worth remembering that Richter created his own soundtrack for sleep—an eight-plus-hour composition from 2015 that reveals an ongoing interest in how music might accompany daily life. “On one level, it’s a lullaby; on another level, it’s a piece of neuroscientific research,” Richter told me. “It’s something to accompany you on your journey through the night.” (March 19 being World Sleep Day, the documentary about Richter’s Sleep hits Mubi today, while a meditative one-hour version of the music debuts on the SLEEP app.)

Here, calling from his home in the Cotswolds, outside Oxford, Richter talks about platinum as muse, an upcoming Margaret Atwood ballet, and his version of a beauty routine.

Vanity Fair: What have you been listening to over the past few months, whether for comfort or simulation or distraction—to speed up time or to slow it down?

Max Richter: I’ve spent a lot of time with Beethoven this past year. Beethoven’s 250th birthday [arrived] in December, so he’s been on my radar in a new way. I mean, he’s kind of always there, but in a new way. And I’ve been listening to a lot of electronic music—a lot of Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith and those sorts of folks. 

You’ve said that your inspiration comes from the process of living. What aspects of life lately, whether quotidian or atmospheric, have shaped your creative process?

The pandemic is obviously the big subject at the moment, one way or another. I feel like it’s shone a spotlight on a lot of the questions we’re facing as a culture globally, and questions which were present already but a little under our radar: to do with connections, with nature, issues of social justice. The pandemic—in a way, because it’s forced us all to stop—has also given us an opportunity to reflect on what’s actually important. Certainly as a musician, music is fundamentally a communicative activity. It’s a creative, collaborative activity. And to be deprived of the contact with my colleagues, my friends, to have that sort of kind of limb taken away, is a huge thing, actually. I’m very fortunate: I’m a composer, so my life isn’t out on the road, touring around. But certainly for musicians, actors, performers of all sorts, it’s been really hard.

I see a lot of dance, which I’m obviously not doing at this time. There was no better source of meditation than being in a dark theater, where you could focus on the performance but your thoughts could float around at the same time. Similarly with music: Has that shift from being an immersive experience to an intimate one shaped what you’re working on?

It’s interesting because our life formerly has been a mix of real-world experience and digital experience, and that’s kind of a rich blend. But when you take away the real world, you realize how impoverished the digital experience really is. It’s just not a substitute. It’s interesting you mentioned dance. I have a new ballet project for [the Royal Ballet] and the National Ballet of Canada, with Wayne McGregor and Margaret Atwood. It’s the MaddAddam trilogy, which is going to be good. That was supposed to be happening [in 2020], but we pushed that a year. Working with dancers is, for me, one of the great pleasures because my world is full of text and ideas and concepts. Dance is kind of a different language. It’s very emotional, but it is, in a way, abstract and nonverbal. 

The concept of music folding in with skin care is unexpected. When you first began working with La Prairie, what ideas did you find yourself engaging with?

This project is all about this idea of platinum. The associations that come with that element are mostly, actually, emotional ones—with rarity and the extraordinary uniqueness of this thing, which was created in a split-second moment in the early universe. [There’s] a sort of preciousness, and a semi-eternal quality. And then connecting that into Nobuhiro’s work, which is really about a subjective personal experience with nature—a very beautiful response. So it was really trying to make a musical landscape, which could in some way convey these ideas. Composition is about trying to find something which feels inevitable and innate to the world you’re working in, and that’s an experimental process. I was just searching for a language which could make that feel very natural.

The music really has two aspects to it. It has a sort of objective landscape—the bigger world—and that embodied in a pulsating, primal kind of a sound. And then you have a kind of subjective human universe in the foreground, in the cellos and all of these melodic elements. They’re really like figures in that landscape. So it’s an illustration of that relationship: the human and the eternal in polarity.

As people seek out music in this time, so much of that experience is mediated by algorithms. Having come up in an era when people would discover things as a function of searching for them, what’s your thought on this algorithmic intervention?

[laughs] Well, like everything, there are upsides and downsides. The upside is that people have a risk-free opportunity to sort of graze through the musical universe, so that’s good. It’s also good that people can easily listen outside of the musical cultures and categories they would normally listen to. On the other hand, there is something reductive about the way these platforms operate. They flatten everything out, so everything becomes a file or a stream rather than the creative work of a human mind. These are new technologies. It’s going to take time for them to settle down into ways where we get more of the upside than the downside.

It’s funny that these generated playlists have oddly specific names, like Bathing Sounds or Music for a Traffic Jam.

That’s probably an algorithm that comes up with those names, even!

La Prairie has this concept of the Platinum Moment, where time is suspended. How do you feel about the passage of time in a physicalized way? Does that concern you? Give me the beauty routine.

My beauty routine [laughs]. For me, it’s an interesting question. I’ve had a lengthy, I guess decades-long, meditation practice, and over the years it’s centered more and more on walking and being in a landscape. That experience of thinking while walking is something very, very fundamental and very healthy, actually, because a lot of my world is very abstract. It’s very conceptual, it’s very wordy. That’s one of the reasons I live out in the Cotswolds because it’s that sort of green mind, which is a great antidote to our very screen-based lives nowadays. I guess what I’m saying is, it’s about balance. It’s making those connections.

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