Max Richter’s The Blue Notebooks draws from Kafka’s The Blue Octavo Notebooks, where Kafka’s reflections on alienation and doubt resonate with the themes of the record. Originally released in 2004, The Blue Notebooks was conceived as a “protest record, a response to what was happening in politics around the build-up to the Iraq war where I was really struck with doubt about what was happening. And I thought about Kafka, who’s the patron saint of doubt, and I thought about making a piece which expressed everything, so we recorded this.”
