Our collective listening sessions were quite all over the place today. The first 3 hours were a mix of 15, 25, and 45-minute songs that could be defined by the words noise, exploration, experimentation and “wtf moments”. It led us to talk about that relational period of our common journey… Ben was the “star” of the day, and he left us with fabulous quotes, both incredibly hilarious and vividly explicit, describing what he went through having to deal with Moose and Sef at the time… 

“If I had believed that committing suicide would lead me to heaven, it would have been ‘angels, here I come!’” 

“I think that song could be described as someone stumbling in all the instruments for 45 minutes”

“Oh, another 18 minutes song, it should be an amazing one” (1)           

“Man, Sef… It’s either 110% on all the time, or 1000% of 25 songs played at the same time. And none is 10 thousand miles close to the one we are playing at the moment… For 20 minutes.”

“Have you ever heard the sound of a genocide of baby seals?” *proceeds to isolate all the sounds Sef was generating on one the songs* 

And on, and on, and on. We ended up spending much of the afternoon switching from deeply emotional songs to squealing animal sounds captured in 20-plus-minutes of sonic massacre. The contrast was quite eye opening, and we were able to address some of the issues we had as a collective, going from Your Favorite Enemies’ evolving resistance to the passive aggressive behaviors where some of us were fighting my desire to creatively move on… I could tell who was playing what and when on pretty much all of those songs, the object of a power struggle we were dealing with at the time. If some of those moments were embarrassing, non-edifying, and heartbreaking to hear — all the microphones were on and recorded everything — it served as a living testimony to the people we became individually since then, and how much of a miracle it is now to be in the same room together…     

(1) The last 6 minutes were indeed amazing, when Sef went away to grab a coffee at that point in the session…