Nick Hornby has been my favourite author for a long time, especially since I read High Fidelity in 1999.
I always felt a strong connection with his books. Somehow, I felt identified with his writing a bit more than other favorite authors of mine, such as J.L. Borges, Paul Auster or Oscar Wilde.
Hornby has a son with autism.
My wife is a psychologist, and she specializes in children with autism and developmental disorders.
One day I was improvising soundscapes in the Nord Lead 2x synthesizer, and she told me that the children she worked with at an institution would like that type of music.
These children had a “relaxation hour” in the afternoon, after lunch, although they used to be hyperactive and could not relax during that hour.
So, I recorded an improvisation for them, creating layers of sound with the Nord Lead 2x and a phrase sampler, a loop recorder that allows to progressively superpose different layers of sounds.
When I was setting up the equipment to record this track, I started imagining myself lying on the grass, looking at a blue sky in an autumn morning, feeling the warm Sun on my skin. With no other connection to the world other than that grass, that sky, that Sun.
The children loved it.
They connected with the music, listening to every sound and enjoying the musical moment.
It was an incredible feeling that a recording that came out naturally, in a “wild state” of improvisation and spontaneity, was something these children connected with.
One becomes surprised by coincidences.
But at one point, one starts to disbelieve in coincidences.
And starts to make some sense out of them. To draw an arc, a story. To believe there’s something there.
I immediately remembered the beautiful and inspiring words from Paul Auster: “I’ll see it when I believe it”.
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