AHF & The Noise Orchestra

We had a quick collective dinner, Saturdays being the famous Momoka Burger Special for the guys. I quickly got through my Asian veggie plate and went back to the studio with Ben. Knowing I would spend most of Monday and Tuesday at the hospital, I wanted to keep on floating in our creative flow while I had enough energy before crashing for the night. The guys joined us soon after. We watched an excerpt of the excellent documentary “Energy” about Damo Suzuki, produced by acclaimed friend director Michelle Heighway, a 7-year life investment for everyone involved in what is a more than ever necessary public testimony of a vital individual and artist. Momoka explained just how instrumental Damo had been in the avant-garde scene of Japanese culture, not only with music in particular but towards society in its most grandiose way. “True art reveals itself in the tiniest details of our existence, that’s why the likes of Damo Suzuki are so important in a highly structured nation such as the one we have been perpetuating for centuries in Japan,” she explained, which makes his impact even more palpable for us. “For some, it’s only screams and noise, while for those willing to listen to the invisible, it’s a unique symphony of life evolving through us all,” she added.
It reminded me that before I decided to call the band “The Long Shadows”, in an effort to honor just how significant its different constituents were to the whole affair of what is not so much of a “solo” venture, I almost named us “AHF and The Noise Orchestra”, but figured it would be another way for me to hide in the midst of a safe collective appellation. It’s always been easier for me to assume what I was doing in the context where I don’t have to make my own name stand by any of it, and it was long overdue for me to assume myself. So it was more of a therapeutical decision than an egocentric one. That being said, the vision I had for my creative vehicle never changed and the closest that I came to that was what ultimately gave birth to the album “Standing Under Bright Lights”; an ensemble of artists formed of multi-instrumentalists eager to deconstruct and reimagine whatever one would contribute to the mix, and to assemble no matter what it would become after it has been turned into an entirely transformed movement of a living organism, growing and metamorphosing itself solely based on its own terms. That’s the vision I have. Think Elvis’ big band Vegas, a classical string quartet, a few Motown backup singers in the context of Sonic Youth meet Swans meet Leonard Cohen meet Fugazi meet Radiohead meet Ryuichi Sakamoto meet Godspeed You! type of band — if it makes sense to you! That mix is quite incredibly appealing to me, but you understand why my bandmates can be a little confused with it all now 😉

We ended up listening to a lot more songs, from which a few discoveries were totally “it”, adding to the increasing paramount state of my already high level of enthusiasm towards the album slowly unveiling itself before our marveled eyes, in quite an extraordinary fashion… It’s fabulously exhilarating!!!