The Silent Room” was the name of a tune for our first album, and it also became the name of the whole album. After ten years and two more albums, I saw it fitting as a name for the whole project. Because “The Silent Room” can be seen as our inner room, a room that we can enter under deep concentration, for instance when practicing music. A place where everything is about precision and flow, where no thoughts will enter and disturb the silence.
This is always achievable; it is lying there right under the surface. It is trance. It is connection to something beyond us. And I feel that it is mainly what this project is about.
The melodies sometimes come out of dreams. I have noticed that if you try, it is often possible to remember melodies that appear in your dreams. Even a surviving fragment can be enough to build on. About a third of the tunes on these three albums are based on dreamt themes. Another third or so, is related to certain places. I often get the feeling when I come to a place, that there is a melody lingering there, like a hidden Pokemon, and I need to pick it up.
This third recording got the name “Touch the Music”. When I listen to music, especially intense improvised music, it can bring a vision of some creature flying and dancing around a ball of fire. Always being drawn to it, getting close, but never touching it.
One of the tunes of the album also got that name. That tune was built on a kind of silly idea of making a melody, where the internal logic of the melody would be the only thing that counted, regardless of all other concerns, like having a rhythmic structure that makes some sense. This would be one way of many, to try to get close to the core of the music, or to one of the aspects of music. Another way would be like in “Kar-gy-raa” of the second album, to have a melody that can hardly be considered as a melody, more like a mantra, that repeats itself over and over until it dissolves in rhythm. In “The Ladder”, the opener for this latest album, I aimed to reach this concentrated feeling through a kind of rigid approach to the improvisation.
It is such a bliss to work with the musicians in this group. We started about 15 years ago, after I had considered to start a band like this for some years. And the group has been the same on all three records, with additional musicians on some tracks. I’m so grateful to everyone involved. And to you who listen most of all!
