6 Minutes Diary

Like many musicians, when the coronavirus hit in March I lost all my work in a matter of days. I had a complicated schedule for March and April, filled with tours, festivals, and local concerts, and it all evaporated very fast.

Minimal and nuanced, Diary of a Candle is a consoling, melodic suite from acclaimed experimental composer, musician, and producer Faten Kanaan. On this album Faten uses counterpoint as a narrative tool to create music that is mysterious, smudgy, and deeply melodic. From the repetitive structures of modern minimalism and early music/baroque influences - to more languid textural ebbs and tides, there's a warmth in her use of synthesizers that gives her work a curiously timeless feel. Composing intuitively, her music creates its own world - one that isn't easily categorised.

Claire Huangci proves herself to be a vividly expressive interpreter of Chopin, the first since Artur Rubinstein to offer a complete cycle of the Nocturnes by Frédéric Chopin. During her background research work into Chopin’s oeuvre she repeatedly came across poems by French authors such as Charles Baudelaire, Victor Hugo and Tristan Corbière. She began to form associations and found a poem contemporary to each of Chopin’s nocturnes. You will find the links between poetry and music in the CD booklet.

Hailed by The Philadelphia Inquirer as “laugh-out-loud funny” and “a great and an unexpected joy,” The Rum Diary “reveals a young Hunter S. Thompson brimming with talent.” Based on Thompson’s own experiences as a reporter in Puerto Rico for The Nation, the National Journal, and the San Juan Star in the late fifties and early sixties, The Rum Diary is a tangled love story in a Caribbean boomtown. The narrator, Paul Kemp, irresistibly drawn to a sexy, mysterious woman, is thrust into a world where corruption and get-rich-quick schemes rule, and anything (including murder) is permissible. In his signature tongue-in-cheek style, Thompson presents a dazzling, comedic romp, a fictional excursion as riveting and outrageous as his popular Fear and Loathing books.

Based on Anne Frank's diary, and the stage play that was adapted from it: In Nazi-occupied Holland, Otto Frank and his family have decided to go into hiding, because of the increasing persecutions against Jews. The businessman Kraler and his assistant Miep prepare a hiding place in the rooms above their place of business, and arrange for the Franks and another family, the Van Daans, to stay there.

The heartfelt alt-rockers revisit and remake their storied 1994 debut, taking a journey into the past that transcends mere nostalgia.

This "short diary (of loss)" as drummer Sebastian Rochford calls it is offered as "a sonic memory, created with love, out of need for comfort.

Movies that claim to be based on a true story are often a loose interpretation, and this concept record is a bit like that. I really did run away from home, if only for a few days, and parts of this song diary come from those honest emotions and true events. But I wanted these songs to flow like good film, like my daydreams do, so I took a storyteller s liberty here and there. My hope is that this collection is an all-encompassing escape for the listener; a chance to runaway for 45 minutes and get lost in a good story. - Amy