Some time ago the Norwegian-Danish writer Lars Sabye Christensen began composing poems in the various hotel rooms he was staying in and sending them to his friend, the Norwegian pianistcomposer Ketil Bjørnstad. Bjørnstad responded to Christensen's prompt by creating elegant, understated piano settings for his words and, now, has recorded them with Anneli Drecker, actor and singer with the dream-pop band Bel Canto (and stranger to the hotel-room experience as a result of touring the world with the likes of A-ha). The track titles are drawn from the particular hotel names and city locations – ‘Astor Crowne, New Orleans’, ‘Palazzo Londra, Venice’ – where the words were written. The opening cut, ‘Mayflower, New York’, begins with what could be an echo of ‘My Way’ – “I’ve got a funny feeling/That the end is near” – and indeed this most existential of albums about solitude (“hotel rooms taught me how to be alone,” writes Bjørnstad in the liner notes) constantly feels as though it's drawing to a (solitary) close. Which is not to say that it's depressing. Quite the opposite: intimate and unostentatious in delivery, it makes a rather charming companion, full of delightful poetic aperçus, such as this from ‘Mayday Inn, Hong Kong’: “I prefer small rooms/big rooms make me nervous/I get lost between the bed and the shower/the window's too far away.”