Richard is renown for his expressive and innovative use of acoustic instruments. His much-imitated treatment of strings — at once visceral and haunting — began in 2007 on the Box of Birch album, and was later developed on his trio of ground-breaking recordings, Marking Time (2008), Landings (2009) and Verse of Birds (2011). His work has been lauded in Gramophone, Mojo, Q, Record Collector and The Quietus, among others, and in 2011 he was featured on the cover of The Wire magazine. In 2013 he was shortlisted for a Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award, and in 2014 he was a finalist for the Arts Foundation Award for Experimental Music.

Over the past decade and a half his recorded music has been used in feature films (The Mountain, The Loneliest Planet, The River), documentaries (Territoire Perdu, Les Tourmentes, Small Country), and, more recently, he has produced scores for films, including Mark Gill’s Morrissey biopic England is Mine (2017), and award-winning documentary film director Pierre-Yves Vandeweerd’s exploration of the ghosts of genocide in Armenian Azerbaijan, Les Eternels (2017). In 2023 he composed music for Theatre Complicite’s adaptation of the Olga Tokarczuk novel Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead. He has also written for the Elysian Quartet, as well as numerous art commissioning bodies, including Art Assembly, AV Festival, Atlas Arts, Borealis Festival and HIAP. In 2021 his album of library music, After the Cities, was published in the EMI KPM Shorts series.

His compositions range from the delicate and intimate to the violently intense, and increasingly combine acoustic and electronic instrumentation. His work is particularly suited to scoring noir drama for film and television.

Credits

You Never Know, One Day You Too Might Become a Refugee
(Lena Dobrowolska & Teo Ormond-Skeaping, 2023)
Know Your Place (Zia Mohajerjasbi, 2022)
The River (Ghassan Salhab, 2021)
Small Country (Gregor D. Sinclair, 2021)
Lockdown 1.0 - Following the Science (BBC, 2020)
Flower & Grain (Gustavo Souza, 2018)
England Is Mine (Mark Gill, 2017)
Les Eternels (Pierre-Yves Vandeweerd, 2017)
R. Enstone (James Varley, 2014)
Les Tourmentes (Pierre-Yves Vandeweerd, 2014)
Graduates (Tomáš Krupa, 2012)
The Loneliest Planet (Julia Loktev, 2011)
Territoire Perdu (Pierre-Yves Vandeweerd, 2011)
The Mountain (Ghassan Salhab, 2010)