Limited Edition Heavyweight 180g Vinyl!
 
The Blue Notebooks was Max Richter's second solo album, a distinctive and adventurous work that is beautifully recorded and cinematic in scope. Opening with a text from Franz Kafka, read by Tilda Swinton, over a sparse piano melody, the album moves through the heart-wrenching “On The Nature Of Daylight” to sparse but lyrical piano pieces, hazy swirling atmospherics, avalanche pulse-beats and partially occluded melodies.
 
Richter uses piano, cello, violin and viola, alongside electronic beats, spoken word passages and the occasional field recording (including a very realistic crow). Other sounds were generated via old guitar pedals and vocoders. The organ music was made for a chapel near Tourtres in South-West France, whilst the environmental sounds are mainly recorded around London.
 
Peppered across Richter’s music like diary entries (and backed with attendant typewriter clatter) are a number of literary texts or “shadow journals” (from Kafka and Czseslaw Milosz’s “Hymn Of The Pearl.”) Chosen by Max on instinct, these brief passages muse over time, memory, and the impermanent nature of things.
 
"He closes in on reflecting the glowing consciousness of the composer, who is using music to keep alive the idea that there is somewhere to go next, a new place to think, and a new way to listen." -Paul Morley

Tracklist:

Side A
1. The Blue Notebooks
2. On the Nature of Daylight
3. Horizon Variations
4. Shadow Journal
5. Iconography
 
Side B
1. Vladimir's Blues
2. Arboretum
3. Old Song
4. Organum
5. The Trees
6. Written On the Sky
7. On the Nature of Daylight (Bonus Track)