Since my second European tour in 2007, I have been developing what seems to be the same live set. Evolving more than developing as the so called progress has more or less taken its natural path. The lines that mark the title of this chapter dripped off my tongue during my first performance at L’mono almost 2 years ago, a time of turmoil it seemed then (little did I know what the near future had installed for me anyway), and those words resonated with a violent reverberation within the hollow between my ears as I screamed out the last remaining thought in all hope of exorcising the ghosts within. A prelude of sorts, always an introduction, empty pages waiting to be written. These chosen words exude ambivalence, as it can, could, has, had, will be used for bringing the spotlight on to the very speaker, writer, communicator of those very words. To be used and abused by politicians left right and center, preachers and fanatics of every order and religious beliefs, punk stars rock stars and astrologers, therefore now the time has come and the time is now, to use the words the time has come and the time is now, joining the kilometer long linage of users of the phrase – the time has come and the time is now…
The story behind the published story is somehow always more interesting (exceptions of course – the village drunk). The processes involved forms the road map of the mind (and sometimes beyond that) of the author, an open book so to speak, the window to the soul. In describing the journey I have taken so far, I hope to transmit better the idea that what is summed up normally as a conclusion in a paragraph long press release, album sleeve note or a book length graduation thesis, is merely surface scratching at best. This is a story of a mind in constant flux during a certain period of creative explosion.
At the first footsteps of my string plucking daze, I accompanied my recklessly atonal, rhythmically handicapped guitar playing with words taken from my ‘little black book’. Constantly contorting my unused diaphragm in a desperate attempt to keep up the tune (more like keep in tune) while multitasking my left hand finger gymnastics with right wrist fluctuations. There were songs that had enough words for a page in the newspaper, and enough lyrics to fill a volume of Brittanica.
So when those nine magic words slipped from my tongue, an epiphanic gust blew upon me, that less in this case (of my boring pamphlet filling lyrics) is much much more. Since that hurricane of minimalism (probably coming from minimal usage of thinking organ leading to too much condensation in the hollow between ears, dampening high frequencies in the reverberation making the epiphany clearer), I have been trying to see how far one can take just a few lines and make them weigh more than dictionary.