On Being
For my latest album project, I asked the question "what do you want to express that you feel you can't in everyday life?". I hadn't expected too much to come back, but when I had a look after some months I was shocked by what had been submitted.
This database of thoughts and feelings became the source of the "On Being" album, installations and website.
Most of the tracks on the album concern themselves with a single quote, but for one piece, I wanted to tackle the feeling of the whole collection.
There's so many beautiful, scary, funny, sad, horrific, mundane and absurd expressions of our shared humanity in there, there's a very particular emotional impact of reading through the collection.
It's very hard to put into words because of that range of emotions it contains, but somehow music is able to capture all of that in a way that language can’t. That's what the piece of music is about. It started from the sound of Felix Gerbelot's viola, and eventually became the title track of the album.
One of my favourite artists in the world, Masanobu Hiraoka, kindly agreed to visualise the idea, hand drawing on his own life story, blended with the quotes, to become something universal and immensely moving. He tells the story of our shared adventure as we try to make sense and make a path through this.