Sundays are always a bit randomly messy and chaotic to be around; different music is playing everywhere in the presbytery, where Leonard and I have established our private quarter for the time we’ll be here. You can hear laughter, vacuums, doors opening and closing, and people prepping the traditional collective brunch in the morning. It’s the total opposite of the peaceful nature defining our home in the mountains. Even Leonard looked at me a little puzzled around 6:30 – 7 am this morning, the time we usually get out of bed to start the day, as if he was telling me: “Where are we and why are we staying here?” The beautiful answer to that legitimate “let’s go back home” type of sub-question his eyes conveyed only stood a few steps away from our room: the creative sanctuary, which has slowly started to feel much more like the sacred retreat I always envisioned this place to be when I bought the church more than a decade ago and transformed it into an art atelier vibrating through our free hearts and souls. You don’t need any refuge when you are free, that’s why I foresee it all as a sanctuary where we can redefine who we are from one instant to another, emancipated from any forms of our inner paralyzing make-believe or sterile self-imposed limitations. If it never came close to any of that vision, naive but honest, I’m utterly astonished to see it grow this way a little more after each listening session I have with the rest of the band. It’s greatly spiritually nourishing for me, and I’ve never been that eager to get back into that sensation of pure levitation. Even Leonard never came with me that often before, it was MacKaye’s thing to follow me in there. So I’m happy when Leo will bark at the door leading to a corridor where the studio’s “secret door” entrance lies. 

But who means “day off”? I was already talking with Ben about certain layers of sounds before 9 am, referencing late American painter Jackson Pollock’s expressive spontaneousness to describe the type of sonic expressionism I wanted to dive into. Hopefully Ben is now an “Alex’s nonsense decoder” master, or I would feel very lonely on my island of abstract ideas and bizarre intentions. No need to say that it mightily helps to have a common sort of communicative lexicon because others rarely understand a single word of my phraseology. I mean, Jackson Pollock’s art, it’s easy to figure out how it might sound in everybody’s head while looking at his art pieces… right?!

“Ben, can you just play the Pollock example I told you about this morning?” Then Ben will do so, to what I will add: “See? Jackson Pollock!” I guess the others don’t have much of my voice and my different instruments in their headphones after all! It’s all about the uproar motions of blooming, breaking, and blooming and breaking of the ongoing stream of our emancipated waves… That’s why communal misunderstanding is a wonderful state to be in. You have to lose yourself in order to discover that you became somebody else along the way. It doesn’t have anything to do with right or wrong, that’s the blessing of it all. And I guess that’s also the reason why I believe we had to bring Jeff, Miss Isabel, and Moose to the “Burning the Bridges” canvas of a movement Ben and I had written down.