As well as containing the original twenty-five minutes developed in collaboration with McGregor, the CD features additional material that presents further perspectives on the original score, working with the same minimal instrumentation used for the ballet: string quintet, piano and electronics.

When staged, the artist Julian Opie contributed an animated backdrop of simple figures walking in profile, providing the external, or ‘above’ to Infra’s ‘beneath’ that was acted out by the Royal Ballet’s dancers to reveal the otherwise invisible, silent dramas of day-to-day life. But Infra’s music does not need this visual component to describe these mimed conditions. It opens with the dead air of a shortwave radio that continues its search across empty wavelengths for most of the album. This breakdown in communication is made all the more frustrating by the occasional fleeting hints of morse code, speech and a train whistle that also reappear throughout representing our external, non-musical reality, inhibited and constrained. Meanwhile, Richter’s orchestrations for strings and piano provide a narrative of internal reality, of the complex emotions that we choose not to broadcast, from the yearning melody of strings that strive to overcome the atonal air of the opener, through delayed and distorted refrains that suggest a sombre caution, only to be reinterpreted subsequently as earnest and aspirational by a bold, richly repetitive piano.

The intuitiveness of the sentiments behind the sounds are thanks in part to the prevalence of Baroque-inspired classical music in cinema, and particularly to Michael Nyman’s success in modernising the style across many of his film soundtracks, where Western audiences have become well-primed to identify emotive instrumental connotations. But Infra is also a testament to Max Richter’s confident crafting of scores for modern applications, whose pared down, no frills ensemble combines contextual noises with traditional tonality to create a language that conveys the reality of our hidden emotions with greater clarity than words ever could.