Hand of Thought

The hand extended across generations.

Yes, the music industry is fucked. But I still love making albums.
Nothing like escaping reality through my own construction of a concept and context where the music I’m writing makes perfect sense - it can become a bit of an obsession, but in a deliberately magical and witchy way.
Part of it has to do with the limitations that reveal themselves while attempting to share a story and stay connected within each of it’s chapters. Sometimes the outline is clear at the beginning, and other times, I need to write a bunch of music and then what-I’m'-writing-about is slowly revealed to me and the concept becomes clear.
There is also something that feels so circular about the process - like closing a circuit because you were able to connect the wires and witness the lights come on.

It felt like this in 2017. I was playing a lot of piano at a residency in Berlin. Probably driving my temporary house mates mad repeating motifs obsessively to a metronome, desperate to improve the level of my playing as a way to salve a bruised ego — a result of various projects or releases not going as planned.
The book I was reading at the time was Opening the Hand Of Thought by Kosho Uchiyama - a simple and profound explanation of zen as a daily life practice, off of the meditation cushion.

Being fairly isolated in Berlin and unable to surrender to the hedonism of it’s nightlife at the time, I spent hours connecting the dots between meditation and piano playing, repetition and embodiment, a fairly prolific exercise. My mind would finally quiet and some sense of stillness would allow my fingers to do the things I was hoping for them to do. This practice was regularly punctuated by thoughts and feelings of the possible presence of my music loving ancestors - sitting with me, listening.

The shape of this album - Hand Of Thought - revealed itself to me slowly.
Lots of iterations on what was initially minimal piano music, eventually turned into this substantial world that really felt like my nostalgic haven.
It’s a body of music I’ve been sitting on for many years because, on the one hand, deep and long term projects take time. Their gestation is valuable because the process itself has so much to teach you. They definitely seem like relics in this social-media-content-barrage-diminishing-attention spans world, but to devalue the patience, the length of time, and the single pointed focus of the process would be such a lost opportunity. Good things do take time.

The music and the essence of the record became clear to me as a way to connect to the women in my maternal blood line - many of whom were piano players. It was in those deep and meditative piano noodlings which eventually turned into songs, that I felt deeply connected to my grandmother, her mother, and her’s..
A connection that is hard to articulate through language, but much easier to distill through music. Which is what I’m attempting on this record.

There was something profoundly healing (in a jagged and mildly brutal sense) about writing on the instrument that brought me to music in the first place. I started playing piano when I was 6-ish, but I never really had a very formal education with it. Coming back to sitting at the piano made me confront some very deep seated and difficult feelings of low self worth, not-enoughness, and literal physical incapability. As an instrument it really does have a knack of being able to do that. I suppose all instruments do, and all musicians probably feel this from time to time.

To continue to play is to tap something of a resilience that confronting your shortcomings offers, and the only way to work with it, is through acceptance - of where you’re at, where you’ve come from, and acknowledging the unknowns of where you’re headed… without misleading yourself to believe you already know what that looks like. To allow those thoughts and feelings of endless comparison, and of whats-the-point, to pass, is to merge with the purpose that is unique to only that player and those notes. Each touch being unique, each hand offering a different intention.

In the years that followed, this album has continued to reiterate this theme for me. I tried endlessly to home it in ways that felt congruent with it’s contemporary and classical feeling. Piano, horns, electronics, texture, theatre, cinema! - trying to sell it to labels as a viable asset to put money or marketing behind. The pandemic certainly didn’t help that cause as I floated through a feedback loop from one potential home to another - just almost signing label deals, and then coming away bruised from their dissolution.

Sometimes epiphanies can smack me in the shower, and other times they’re painful slow-burns. It was while I continued to write and compose, make other albums, release them, perform them, collaborate, and finally drown in an obsession of Vultures through orchestral music that I have chanced upon this understanding at a subtle, individual, and intuitive level. It’s amazing how easily we allow the locus of our validation and worth to slip through our fingers, accidentally outsourcing it to the nebulous entities that offer to legitimise us.
As if each hour spent shaping, imagining, dreaming, writing, or creating isn’t process enough, and as if the conviction that gave birth to the idea in the first place - isn’t imagination enough.

Somehow, thank God, I’m here on the other side of this epiphany. Perhaps my venus is in the moon or something, or I turned 36 and the last vines of my younger self have finally wilted. I’m newly in the vicinity of a sense of pride that I’ve long been missing. This record is some of my best work, and it references something so deliberate for me. Though it’s had private status on my hard drives for so long, I’m grateful it didn’t clog my pipes - I continued to make a lot of music informed by it since it’s completion - it left fertility in it’s private wake as hard things often do.

I used to joke that it was cursed, or there was nazar on it, but the brick has landed gently on my head as I now see what a blessing it has been that I get to home this music myself as I embark on a completely new chapter and share new beginnings through our new record label - Karigar Records.
This will also be the first time I’ll be releasing music under my actual name - a parallel practice to the Sandunes project that I’m newly unfolding this year.

We’re pressing a very limited run of 100 copies of Hand Of Thought on vinyl - link to grab them will be your’s soon!