Faten Kanaan : Diary of a Candle
As “Afternoon,” the opening cut off of Faten Kanaan’s new album Diary of a Candle, begins to play, I am confronted by a haunting question. With its synthesized strings and flutes, which call to mind for me the prog idylls of groups like Camel and Flairck, I hear my wife say, “Is this RuneScape music?” All of a sudden, I can’t unhear it, feeling my inner ear tumbling away from those pastoral sweeps and intimacies of prog at its most genteel suddenly toward dungeon synth. Have I been listening to fantasy video game menu music this whole time? I stare at my notes in contempt.
Drama aside, this subtle shift of the stones of Kanaan’s work from A Mythology of Circles to Afterpoem to this does feel like we’ve suddenly caught her with her foot slipping somewhat. Praise for those two previous records couldn’t get more effusive: one is the stoic light-clad beauty of marble statues and old temples recondite and riven with mystery, while the other is a prog cousin to Anna Von Hausswolff and gives off the air of a Renaissance-era soiree laced with poison and intrigue. It had evaded me what it was precisely about Diary that suddenly felt off. The instrumentation is similar, the outer corona of mood is not different even if the inner sound-image is. Part of it has to do with the simplification of the melodic lines here, which suddenly feel pulled out of the harmonic bed beneath them whereas before she would weave these majestic melodic lines in the midst of vast, slow-moving chordal structures underneath. Suddenly the layering of synth pads and flute sound patches feels like synthesizer music rather than the ineffable majesty she summoned so effortlessly before.
There are, to be clear, solid cuts here. “Supercore” for instance, leads off with a figure that feels just on the cusp of jazz, like something Herbie Hancock might play, so that when the flute patches come in it feels more like an exciting duet of instrumentalists of varying backgrounds finding synchronized magic together. Similarly, a piece like “Acorns,” while slight, has a sense of playfulness to it that’s a delight, especially for anyone with an interest in new age music in general. She was inspired by the minimalist aesthetic of early ’80s electronic and new age music for this album, which explains the greatly clarified structures, but it’s hard not to still hear some of these pieces as frankly a little goofy even with that insight. Perhaps the issue here is a lack of a conceptual throughline beyond an aesthetic; her work all the way back to The Botanist and the Archaeologist always thrummed with a central mood or image that the pieces tilted toward, whether deliberately or not. Lacking that makes Diary feel suddenly less like the magic summoning spell of her previous work.
Kanaan is obviously a gifted and moving composer; our glowing reviews of her previous works still stand as settled opinion about her work. It seems like it is simply time to draw more colors and shapes into her arsenal to gainfully challenge the comfortable place where she’s settled.
Label: Fire
Year: 2025
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