No one ever played the pieces you hear. None of it happened in one room. The orchestra wasn’t there. The counterpoint wasn’t there. Neither were the harmonies.

I walked into a Los Angeles studio with a few sketches for violin and viola. A few seconds each. One musician, Yutaka Kani. One microphone.

Back home, I cut, pitched and stitched those short takes down to the millisecond, into the arpeggios, melodies and textures you hear. An orchestra that never played a single note together.

Usually I start from an idea and turn it into sound. This time the sound came first. And the ideas came from it.

Kierkegaard spoke of the dizziness of freedom. Those takes could have become a thousand different pieces. I combined them the way you hear it. In any other way, it would still be the same piece. Finesse is just one of them, and all of them at the same time.

Then Berlin. Funkhaus. The strings had been built over a piano I recorded in LA, on a Yamaha grand. Paradoxically, the foundation came last: in Berlin, I recorded it again, on an old felt piano. The session started at two a.m. We left the studio at sunrise.

Why replace a flawless recording on a grand piano with a forgotten piano in East Berlin? Why should this violin take follow that one?

Why not? The question became the answer.

The whole record is built on second choices. On what was never supposed to be there.

Maybe art was born from a “what if”. I didn’t want it to sound finished. I wanted it to sound temporary. Momentary, actually.

This time, I wanted to give a voice to what usually gets discarded. To protect it, even from myself. And give life to what would otherwise never have existed.