Composer Max Richter has announced the sequel to his 2020 album ‘Voices’ will be arriving later this year.
Appropriately titled ‘Voices 2’, the album will be closely tied to its predecessor, which was themed around the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The album will be released April 9 through Decca.
“One of the things that was really striking, when we premiered the music, was that even though everyone knows of the Declaration, not many people have actually read it or spent time with it. The overwhelming comment we had from the audience was ‘it’s amazing to hear that text’,” Richter said in a statement.
“If people can have time to experience that text, and then in the second part of the record really spend time thinking about it, that for me is a perfect outcome.”
To coincide with the album’s announcement, Richter has shared the music video for lead single, ‘Mirrors’. The clip was created by Yulia Mahr and features a series of blooming flowers with inverted colours.
“Since the theme of ‘Voices 2’ is the future we wish to write, I chose to concentrate on the topic of re-birth, a new Spring. Hope,” Mahr said.
“The flowers are all negative versions of themselves – out of the negative can be born a future that is full of beauty and the positive. History is not inevitable.”
Watch the clip below:
The original ‘Voices’ record was released last July, and featured hundreds of people reading the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in over 70 languages. Vocals for the project were crowd-sourced from fans.
“The opening words of the declaration, drafted in 1948, are ‘All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights’. These inspiring words are a guiding principle for the whole declaration but, looking around at the world we have made in the decades since they were written, it is clear that we have forgotten them,” Richter said at the time.
“The recent brutal events in the US, leading to the tragic deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, as well as countless other abuses around the world, are proof of that. At such times it is easy to feel hopeless but, just as the problems of our world are of our own making, so the solutions can be.”
Outside of ‘Voices’, Richter is also known for his work on the Ad Astra soundtrack, among other film scores.
