Richter, Ben
Rewild
Rewild (2022) is not meant to be heard as a literal replication of some idealized arboreal setting, but rather a gathering of discrete yet interconnected elements functioning together in balance for a long, slow span of time, suggesting multiple layered and interacting timescales. Put more simply, the music isnt meant to sound like a forest, but instead to evoke to a listener the depth, breadth, and interdependence of a wild ecosystems very being, as well the amount of time such actions take to evolve-and, perhaps, how fragile and precarious the system actually is. Just as the natural processes of ecology and evolution that inspired Ben Richter (b. 1986) are too slow, spacious, and complex to command most human attention, so, too, does the resulting music exist in a space that might be imperceptible, unless listeners made a concerted effort to listen deeply and hear differently. As in the natural world, that attention is rewarded with the apprehension of something uncanny and marvelous.