This is essentially my last few hours alongside Robert before Jeff, Miss Isabel, Ben, and Sef (he made it!) join me in Tangier to start working on the second album production of my 5-part creative installment. I know… I just barely finished the first record… Well, kind of. There’s an additional song completing the journey that needed an extra measure of clarity for me to fully dwell in, which happened yesterday, perched on my riad rooftop, from where I watched life unfold its chaotic beauties before my wandering eyes. And just like that, everything that seemed so blurry, so foggy, started untangling, to vividly appear through colors and sounds, as the song basically started playing from within me. And at that very instant, the album voyage appeared in some vivid and bright colorful display of lights… “The inception phase is complete,” I told myself.
Following that sort of epiphanic moment, the sensations I experienced were much more related to a sense of whirl dizziness and emotional exhaustion than to any kind of fulfillment and relief, to be honest… Maybe it was due to the fact that it’s been an increasingly painful process or a kind of physical and psychological collapse that suddenly took me over… Or maybe both. Probably both…
Talking with a friend, she assumed I must be stoked that my album was finally done, that I had reached the finish line. I laughed kindly, interjecting that where I am at with the record is actually the starting point of an adventure and that I was absolutely clueless about what may be coming next. I just don’t know… And I’m profoundly glad I don’t, because I would probably be stressed about it, try to define and redefine it in order to keep control over it, or freak out — all at the same time! Better not knowing. At that point it’s healthier for me and probably even more for the people around me as well.
She asked me to describe the record since nobody ever knows what to expect from one expressive project to another, which is the ultimate compliment you can give me as a creator. That simple yet very complex question led to a substantially rich type of conversation. And funny enough, I never mentioned through the whole conversation any musical genre, artistic direction, or even lyrical themes, which, in retrospect, helped me realize that I essentially crafted something that unconsciously embodied, both sonically and affectively, intangible elements reflecting, or foreseeing, the humanization extending towards self-transformation, which may lead to a sort of personal rebirth through some shedding spiritual renaissance. Something felt rather than conceptualized, an inner form of freedom I believe we all aspire to live… At least I do. Obsessively. Yes, you probably couldn’t guess, but I can be a tiny bit intense… once in a while!
We concluded our conversation with her inviting me to send her a written description of what I presently thought the record was, instinctively, without putting too much thought into it, so we could resume our conversation about it in a few months to see how my perception of the album’s nature would have evolved after I started abandoning myself in a communal concert context. I found it was a very interesting, if not incredibly intriguing, idea… So this is the exact transcript of what I sent her in French.
Je crois qu’il s’agit d’un voyage à travers les recoins profonds et sinueux de l’esprit humain, une forme d’immersion dépourvue de repères familiers, nous permettant de nous affranchir totalement de nos liens et de nos attachements affectifs préfabriqués afin de toucher au divin et au sacré, une immersion ancrée dans l’expérience humaine plutôt qu’une projection aseptisée et intellectualisée de ce que pourrait signifier une véritable libération de nos entraves émotionnelles et de nos constructions illusoires de sécurité.
The fairly close English translation would be something like this:
I believe it is a journey through the deep, winding recesses of the human spirit, a form of immersion devoid of familiar reference points, allowing us to break free entirely from our ties and pre-fabricated emotional attachments so as to touch the divine and the sacred, an immersion rooted in human experience rather than a sanitized, intellectualized projection of what true liberation from our affective shackles and illusory constructs of security might mean.
I suppose that, in a more unadorned way to illustrate the album’s journey lying ahead of us, I could say that it’s a stream we’ll all have to dwell in over and over and over again for the experience to turn itself into something meant to be lived rather than a collage of noise forming an entity designed to be circumspect, understood, and entertaining and, therefore, limited and entirely meaningless. (I initially wrote “worthless”, but it was a bit too extreme a statement to say considering the devoted self-engagement that has been invested in the project by so many… but you get the point.)
So that’s my present assumption about something I absolutely have no idea how it will bloom or what it will unfold into. This is the utmost blessed standpoint for me to be in right now, the pinnacle of all pure and innocent perspectives on something much wider than I can figure out... and much greater than I am.
That being said, I’m not only immensely disposed to keep on being moved by it all but also enthusiastically disposed and unsoundly willing to lose and find myself again and again and again in its proposed motion.
Life creates life
Your friend and brother,
Alex
PS: Jeff, Ben, Miss Isabel, and Sef are only a couple hours away from Tangier as I’m writing those words… It will be special to be reunited all together once again, to start immersing ourselves in the second installment of that blistering and colossal project, meaning that the voyage will keep on widening and deepening itself a whole lot more in the months to come… Before that, you can expect to see me sharing some videos of my upcoming writing sessions pretty soon. ;)
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.