Dip Your Ears*, No. 205 (The Blue Notebooks or: Recycling Gone Wrong)
  The Blue Notebooks, Max Richter, Tilda Swinton et al. DG     |
As good as Max Richter’s “Recomposed” version of the Four Seasons was—one of my favorites that year—as ghastly is his “Blue Notebook”, originally from 2004 but now re-released on Deutsche Grammophon. The aggressive simplicity of the music, the—perhaps intentional—barely-competent way single, repetitive violin or piano lines are performed, the dearth of ideas and the derivative style makes it an experience akin to chewing broken Philip Glass. Do you know the third-rate film music that makes you feel cheated for every emotion it manages to muster, against your will? Typewriter-background noise and crows crowing and raindrops dripping undermine any goodwill as Tilda Swinton makes read-out Kafka excerpts sound fearfully hackneyed. The liner notes have nothing to say about the release at hand, instead they just promote Richter and projects past and upcoming and the added bonus track is (or sounds like) a discarded out-take from the Vivaldi recording. Yikes!
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(* Dip... or not. This should probably be part of the "Reviewed, Not Necessarily Recommended" series.)
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