A double dose today - I may not have much time over the next few weeks so thought I'd get 'em in while I can! Max Richter's music is frequently deciptively simple but always engaging and moving. He is probably best known for his magnum opus "Sleep", the 8.5 hour epic designed to interact with both the waking and sleeping mind. My personal favourite however, is his early collection "The Blue Notebooks", hailed by critics as one of the greatest classical works of the the century (ok admittedly we're only a quater of the way through it, but still...). "On the Nature of Daylight" from that collection has reached a wide audience through its inclusion in TV and films as diverse as Shutter Island (2010), Disconnect (2012), Arrival (2016), and The Last of Us (2023)... Even if you've never heard OF Richter, the chances are you HAVE heard his music. Belying its extensive appropriation as soundtrack, the Blue Notebooks was originally concieved as a social statement about the 2003 invasion of Iraq (a subject close to my heart). Richter himself describes it as "a protest album about Iraq, a meditation on violence – both the violence that I had personally experienced around me as a child and the violence of war, at the utter futility of so much armed conflict." It seems appropriate in the world we find ourselves in to re-kindle that protest. A note on the picture; the background is a photo of the Al Anbari district of Baghdad, where local street artists strive to bring some joy into the lives blighted by the incessant war and its aftermath, notably Ali Khalifa and his "Butterfly Effect" team who deserve to be more widely known.