Tracklisting

“Was This Part of What You Believed?”

I started this project a few months ago, but it feels like years apart. I had a few topics in mind, things I knew moved me deeply, forces I felt I had to try and channel into something. But I didn’t expect to fight my way through what fell upon us in the stretch of the last few weeks to get these ideas out of my chest and into a body of work.

Most like everybody, I have been all at once fascinated, terrified, and uplifted by the variety of chaotic situations we had to wander through at accelerated speed, some of them new, some of them old. Insisting on living and remaining creative in the middle of all of it felt both like a welcome exit and a daunting, suffocating task.

It struck me at some point that it was what I kept writing about: chaos. Not the all-powerful one outside, not the immensity of it, not as a whole. Chaos from my window into the world, chaos from the only visions of it I get to experience and what I make of it, chaos as the only tangible material of life within which to choose what to believe, and what to reject. The tipping point in your inner monologue where no fact can tell you what to think anymore, and you have to decide for yourself. The bottom of the lake.

Chaos, but also the lack thereof sometimes, because as we recently experienced, there can be much dread and destructive power in stillness, and so much can be achieved through successfully generating chaos. How do you make it yours; how do I join it? How do we, together, invoke it? As I’m writing this, people are roaming the streets, risking their physical integrity to cause havoc, so that they can finally be looked at and respected, because as a cohesive conscious force, they understood chaos will be the only available tool powerful enough to redefine the codes of the stale and stagnant forces that rule upon us. I wanted my music to invite some of that energy inside.

This is up to this point my dearest and most personal work. I wish for it to be a way for me, as a single entity, to join a wider body, to belong in a way, be part of an ensemble that doesn’t know me and still that I could call my own. I put a lot of instruments I didn’t play in a while in it, a lot of sounds I felt were threatening to how my work could be perceived, but that I nevertheless loved, and I let go of any restraint I might have had in the past. But more simply, I want it to feel like a few songs, a voice and a mess of instruments emerging from the noise and returning to it. And in between the shape of something I could define.