I spent around 2 years on this piece of music, which ended up with close to 200 layers of different sounds and around 15 hours of improv recordings put into the 10 mins. So there’s a lot going on in one sense, but in another it’s just a simple 1 bar motif that repeats with variations throughout the whole length. I can rarely spend so much time with such a simple musical structure it usually drives me mad after a few weeks and gets mangled or thrown in the bin but this one somehow stuck and I kept plugging away trying to figure out how I could turn it into something which captured the quote “I want to hold the sun in a box”.
I wanted to have as large as possible contrast between the box being closed and the box opening to reveal the blast of brightness. But I also kept going back to the image of a sunrise after an all nighter, with the feelings that brings. All the fresh energy and beauty. The quote was playful too, it’s not something serious like some of the other quotes I worked with for the album, and I tried to get that playfulness into the music as well, which is part of the reason I spent so long on improvised sequences to try and make the track twist and turn on its way to the opening / rising.