Origins

The music that is Flora Lingua has come from a deep love of from various crafts and corners - from what little I’ve tasted of stillness, to the stop motion of Jan Svankmajer, the works of James Joyce, ideas of Krishnamurti, the art of Moebius, and of course, musically - from Bach, Egberto Gismonti, Impressionism, Afro Cuban, the modern jazz of New York in the 2000s like Mehldau or Rosenwinkel, to the free improvisations of Keith Jarrett or Bobby Mcferrin, to name a couple… These influences appear as happy accidents rather than intentional imitations, inside my attempt to spell out the drama of life: the tension and release of a probably not-so-solid-self grappling with non-grappling, the trasncendent, the invisible.

It can feel like a burden to explore what the function of an artist can be. Joseph Campbell proposes a few - should they be interpreting the unseen? The divinity inherent in nature? Communicate myth? Who leads the vision? Where hollywood, recent zuckerbergisms and equivalents, sociologists, and other institutions fall short, I agree with Campbell that the artist is a good fit for the task. Otherwise, what prevails is a saturation of interpreters that cling to a vision that serves neither their community nor themselves - outside the quick high that is a false sense of closure in a squirmy cosmos to avoid the mystery happening all around them. Where truth is slippery, holding an intention to serve what we know is beautiful isn’t too much. The artists can handle that. If we are the universe experiencing itself, they can break it out of the monotony of culture directing it always to consume energy regardless of its relevance to truth or beauty. So, I’m writing some music I’d like to hear!