“The recent music we have been playing takes a different path than any other form of music that we encountered until now. For the past many years we had been working on scores by Toma Gouband consisting mainly of circles shaped by numbers. Melodies, chords, rhythms, timbres (…) and forms of a song are deeply influenced by such phenomena. This time we found magic in letting go of these parameters to reconnect in the first place to our hearts and intuitions while letting the circles work on the overall shape of a piece. In that way we found how to directly connect to the alchemy and poetry of these entities. We also worked with colors to contact and stay in a special flow of energy.

The first track of the album, Shades of Blue is a resonance of the very first tune -a blues – that the trio played in a jam session at the Paradox, in Tilburg (NL) somewhere in the very first years of the XXIth century. D’une deux Violettes and A Scent of Violets are parts of an improvisation/meditation on the color ‘violet’. Following Bob Moore’s teaching, colors are connected to the inborn qualities of a person, and one can develop these qualities by working with colours. For instance ‘violet’ connects to “truth, ritualism, activity, integration, vitality, dignity”. O Virgo Splendens is a free interpretation of a medieval manuscript (XIVth century) borrowed from the ‘Llibre Vermell’ of Montserrat (Catalunya), and is dedicated to the Black Virgin. La Source des Eaux Bleues (Toma Gouband) is based on a ‘circle’ playing with the correlation of the numbers 5, 6 and 7. Le Mont des Milles Blancs and The Road are improvised and somehow illustrate a specific area of the music of the trio. We feel that these few tracks are witnessing a decisive step in our development.”

— Harmen Fraanje, Toma Gouband and Brice Soniano