Of all the creative projects I had the blessing of giving life to, “Kimiyo” holds a very special place in my heart. Not only did I wish to dwell in a soulful artistic endeavor with my collaborator Momoka and my faithful accomplice Ben for a long time, but I guess the particular circumstances in which its gestation took place defined its vulnerable and fierce nature for me. Following my heart surgery, I was deprived of the ability to use my voice and play any instruments and was too weak to bring my usual fire to the fold. I had to accept that I couldn’t be the project’s high-intensity generator or its uplifting undercurrent drive. This also meant that I would have to entirely let go of whatever felt like myself to completely surrender my inner balance to the dynamic identity of the voyage, to completely abandon my consuming frustrations to the sonic sensations, and to embrace my undeniable vulnerability instead of fighting against it. It’s been incredibly difficult for me to do so, as it was unbearable to acknowledge if only a fraction of the serious physical and cognitive precariousness of my health condition. I had almost died less than a month prior to the first writing sessions… I was stuck in a situation I wasn’t prepared to manage, let alone endure.

It’s once I started paying attention to details surrounding me – may they have been sounds, vocal inflections, or subtle noises – that every fragment of those soulful elements slowly began to defy the doubtful structures of the emotions I firmly believed were the source of my limiting frontiers and the foundation of my personal purposeful blurrinesses. That defiance offered me clarity, moments of peace even. Music was vibrating within me. Words had three-dimensional senses. I suddenly could see colors and lights with my eyes closed. The shivers were spiritual until what I initially perceived as my physical restriction became a blessing of sensory liberation. I was one with the stream. I was weightlessly navigating from one note to another, free from any gravitational alienation, as if I was outside my body, in a way… Attuned, floating between the motion treads, fluid. It felt like an elevation of sorts… I was receptive and responsive, like in a kind of emotional levitation. I don’t remember having been that intricately “conscious” in a creative process before, my so-called limitations being my ultimate enfranchisement.

Creating the project at home in Virginia has been a major facilitating factor in my let go, as well as in my eventual disposition to incarnate its essence. My home studio, where everything has been brought to life, is intertwined with luxuriant mountain wildlife; the singing birds, the leaves dancing in the winds, the extensive expression of the night choir, the light rain, the storms and thunder… It’s all there somewhere, radiating between layers of guitars, orchestral assemblages, vocal highs and lows, offering the record an evolving dimension of life, an ever-transforming journey of living palpability transcending time itself, both existential and spiritual. It vividly illustrates a blooming rebirth, a state of heart and soul that is as universally experienced as it is intimately enfranchising.