About “Tu brûles, la valeur est ta flamme”

Some music dwells between the shade and the sparkle, when the flames are at their brightest and hearts feel darkness, looking within the deep kernel of all that language cannot express or fathom

I chose my part of the unspeakable and tried to stick to it as hard as it seemed possible. When finished making this record, I sought to express that very effort of grasping that straw of light with my own words and could not. Then, I found this aphorism by Ludwig Hohl “Tu brûles, la valeur est ta flamme/ You burn, the value is your flame”. It seemed enough at the time. It is the sign on the door. Yet, I felt that something else had to be said. Sometimes, it is necessary to place some words, here and there, so our arrows do not get lost in the noisy ether.

These pieces come from what I saw in my shadow. Nothing exceptional, everyone faces the ashen remains of their reminiscences and dreams everyday, and most of us, try to transform them into ideas, and crawl them back to life, let them inhabit us and then radiate to the outside. In other words, this music connects with the minute personal miseries that keep us bottled in illusion (poverty, separation, mourning, attachment and other serpentine demons).

“Tu brûles...” may also be read as a political statement. I pretended to acknowledge that one cannot be only for oneself. It is a personal realization of the need to relate to all living things. At the time, I thought that elaborate metaphors could precisely state my worries about my land of birth – Ecuador - with its betrayed revolutions and inconsistent and whimsical men of power. Of course, I was wrong, I discovered later that I still lacked the forge in which to fashion the sword with which to struggle against the horrors that capitalist domination imposes on the living world. This task is important, and I dare to say that it belongs to everyone, not only to musicians or poets, because, to quote Agustin García Calvo: "The enemy is inscribed in the very form of his weapons". Therefore, a sword of self reliance and solidarity is badly needed, a sword that will instill the memory of the wild men and women in us because “men and women need now, more than ever in history, to protect the earth, its creatures, the waters, the air, the mountains, the trees, the wilderness. Moreover, when we develop the inner Wild Man, he keeps track of the wild animals inside us, and warns us when they are liable to become extinct” (Robert Bly).