This was the first piece of music I made for the project, with Felix Gerbelot. It’s a summary of the collection of quotes in the database, on which the album is based.
There’s funny, brutal, scary, beautiful, sad, happy, deranged, pleasant, relaxed, distressed thoughts in there, the full range of what it is to be us, now. When I first started reading this collection of thoughts one thing that struck me was the honesty of the submissions. I try my utmost to put honest expression into my music, so it was a special experience to be receiving the same sorts of feelings and messages back, and I wanted to try to translate that summarising experience, and my feelings about the content as a whole, into a piece of music. Somehow.
I tried a lot of things, until one day I rediscovered some recordings I had made with Felix Gerbelot, after a rehearsal for a Terry Riley reworks project with Uele Lamore in Paris. Uele had commissioned a group of strings players for the project, including Felix, and ahead of rehearsal during tuning, I was struck by the harmonies coming from Felix’s viola. After the session I asked if he could stay behind and play some of the chords again, and I took my binaural mics out of my bag which I always have ready for these sorts of unexpected situations. It took some years to figure out how those beautiful viola chords could or should be used, but finally, when faced with this intense database of human expression, the pieces slotted together with some synth development. Music seems to have a way to simultaneously connect to many positives and negatives and the emotional weight of an experience in a coherent manner. It felt to summarise the project in a much more complete way than words can do, for me at least. I hope you can hear what I’m flailing around trying to explain.