Decca (UMO) Classics
Max Richter - The Blue Notebooks (15 Years Edition)
Pickup available at 12 Bar Music and Social - Exeter
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Max Richter wrote The Blue Notebooks in the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, describing it since as a protest record — not really about one war specifically, but about the ordinary human cost of violence in general. He recorded it about a week after the mass anti-war marches in London, and that urgency is audible in it, even now, even without the context.
Tilda Swinton reads extracts from Kafka's Blue Octavo Notebooks and Czesław Miłosz's poetry between the pieces, and the music itself — piano, strings, and Richter's own electronics — sits somewhere between classical minimalism and something closer to ambient. "On the Nature of Daylight" has since turned up in Shutter Island, Arrival and The Last of Us, but hearing it here, in its original context, it means something different: less a swelling cinematic cue, more a genuinely private piece of grief set to music.
This 2LP edition marks the album's fifteenth anniversary, with new arrangements, remixes, and a previously unreleased track, "A Catalogue of Afternoons," alongside the original record in full.
For fans of: Jóhann Jóhannsson, Ólafur Arnalds, Nils Frahm.
Tracklist
Details
Barcode: 0028948352593
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