We made an album from the sounds, feelings, and ideas we had in our minds when we looked back on yesterday’s life. To us, living in this geography, in this tumultuous day-by-day dynamic, it often feels like a life half lived by someone else. Inside it, all the details are right and it’s an endless chase of something disappearing from sight, but from the outside, when you stop and think about it, nothing looks the same. You can’t recognize your choices, and the distinction between you making them and them making you becomes one intertwined knot. We felt our past had built a different world than the one we are living in, and the distance between the two became too large. Now it’s all just a strange memory.
That future, which is not a part of our present, lived on a borrowed past and two directions either way on the scale of time, separated from the one thing we’ve been trying so very hard to avoid. Today.
On this website and in these letters, we want to share honest excerpts from our collective mind palace. About the music, its technical and artistic bits, sometimes the boring side, sometimes all that falls outside the jurisdiction of rhythm and melody. We act very precious with our creations, not because they are above anyone’s reach, but because we always fear they don’t do justice to your attention. But if you are here, and if you are still following these some time in the future, then it means you wish to expose your attention to our attempts anyway, and on that handshake: we can deliver.
So I welcome you into the Letters and leave you with a piece penned for G.E.C. by my dearest friend Andrea.
The past,
We don’t outrun it, we don’t chase it and it doesn’t even have the courtesy to follow. It waits for us, in places we don’t notice until we’ve already stepped back into it, somewhere near rock bottom or in a moment of hesitation, or just sitting at a bar in contemplation, a little longer than we need to, turning the same glass in our hand like it might give us a different perspective. We like to call it familiarity when we do, something we understand and we think understands us. Most of us never meet it face to face. We set it aside on a shelf to collect dust like we’re hoarding bad habits, unfinished things and versions of ourselves we never have the stomach to kill, refusing to pull the trigger on them, leaving them there and hoping time does something to them, as if it ever has.
So when we sink back to it, it all still fits like a glove and that’s the part that convinces us it belongs to us. Familiarity makes slaves of the best of us. We think we’re starting something new after the fact. Maybe a different place with different people and different conditions, but it’s all built on the same superficial architecture, the same assumptions and the same idea of who we’re supposed to be. It takes time before we notice we’re not building anything new and just rearranging the furniture that was already there, and that’s where things fail: not at the fall, but in the repetition. At some point it becomes clear, clear enough to see the pattern and the cycle we’re chained to, and that the comfort that carried us there starts to dull. We can keep carrying it, most of us do, or we can let it go and take what’s left without it. There isn’t much there at first, but it’s the condition we were born in, raw, scared and unadorned.
And even then, we’re not alone in it. We never were, we come into this world needing hands that aren’t ours to nurture and protect us. There are others there too, carrying what’s left of themselves, reaching for a spark the same way we are. What comes after doesn’t come from what we were. It comes from what we’re willing to step into without our burdens. Out beyond what’s familiar, headfirst into the unknown with no promise or certainty of anything in return. We go anyway, and the ground takes us the same whether we belong to it or not.