Beautifully recorded and cinematic in scope, ‘Songs From Before’ once again carries a pensive, emotionally resonant tone. Punctuated by Robert Wyatt’s distinctive, understated readings of Haruki Murakami’s text, the music evokes forgotten memories or lost histories, a series of bittersweet articulations that seem suspended somewhere between a dreamy sense of awe and melancholia. The title refers to the fact that, as well as this being a kind of specimen case of music written over a long period, the album carries other music inside it – with the sources ranging from music between 5 and 300 years old – either used as starting points for Max’s own writing, or submerged deep within.
