'Making noises with my mouth' seemed to describe many human activities, most of them fairly commonplace and not that extraordinary. 'Beatboxing' sounded to me like something you did with your fist, and when I finally found out what a beatbox was (I was still under the age of 10 in the 80s), I began to think this flashing thing that triggered drum sounds and tried for a while to be like it. After time though, I realize that the beatbox wasn't enough, I wanted tones: soaring high choir-like harmonies, low growly bass noises, clicky electronics-sounding textures, the odd brass stab, otherworldly noises... I started calling myself what Kela once coined a 'multivocalist'. Really I wanted to evoke a whole studio from these humble vocal folds. And I suppose this album is the fruits of this journey, an album that, apart from a few effects (reverb, delays, a spot of flage) is create only with sounds that emanate from the space between my lips. However just because it is 'made only with the mouth', I never wanted my music to be about the fact that it is all-vocal. I'm not going to try and write lyrics that call attention to the fact that I'm beatboxing, I'm not going to try and instill a mantra in my listeners 'remember it's all from the mouth' because I hope that the music stands up to those that don't even know this technicality, and I'm betting there are still a few of those.
Eyeopeness is about opening up to the world. As Stephen Vincent Benet said, 'Life is not lost by dying; life is lost minute by minute, day by dragging day, in all the small uncaring ways.' Our experience often feels like a blur, like they say of mad people 'we are not all there'. We are walking through the forests yet we are so burdened with our own troubles that we may not notice the leaves, the bark, we may not hear the wind. We have become prisoner of our own consciousness. There is so much life around, so much cause for happiness, yet we can be blinded to it. Music is something that can temporarily life this veil. I remember times growing up when I saw a performance that left me so awestruck that it simply wasn't possible to be distracted or 'in my head'. When that space is created, when we are totally consumed by something, our mind gives up, and with it our inner anxiety vanishes and it is replaced with fire in the heart, a swelling of emotion that is not just directed at the music, but at the world at large, however fleeting and temporary.
It is the difference between just hearing things and 'deep listening', where we do the hearing with our entire being.
Using a loopstation in most of my live shows, the way the music is written is often with sounds layered upon sounds, layered upon more sounds. In contrast to most popular music, which specifically aims to give ultra-definition between each part of the track, this music is often like a thicket. It is worth wading into though as there are pieces of gold hidden beneath the surface.
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