it starts
2026 · Love Tapes · offnotes records
'it starts' comes out of a project I’ve been working on for the last two years, called Love Tapes. (The name came from a mistake. I meant to say “mixtape,” and I kept the mistake.) In Love Tapes, I write music for one person at a time: my sister, my niece, a close friend. Before I play, I record an audio letter for that person – a conversation, a thought, something I want to share, like a private podcast. Then I move to the piano, and what was said in words keeps being said in sound.
Most of these letters stay private, only between me and the person. Some of them found their way out, released as singles, and now gathered into this album.
It started during the war. I was far from the people I love, and the worry and the longing flooded me. Making music as a letter to one of them was a way to do something creative with that longing.
I call this “in situ relational.” In music, “in situ” usually means a place – an acoustic, an architecture, a landscape the work lives inside. Here, the place of the music is a relationship: a specific person, held in the body while I play. Not as a metaphor, but as a real place the music comes from.
There’s a practice behind it. It’s called Focusing (from the philosopher Eugene Gendlin), and I’ve done it for many years. One person speaks and one listens, and the listener doesn’t interpret or advise – the listener simply holds what comes, and that holding is what lets something not-yet-said find its way into words. In the studio, the person I’m playing to becomes that listener, and the piano is how I let what the body is holding come into sound.
Recorded at Studio Fast Forward in Montreal. Released June 2026 on offnotes records.
tracklist
- It starts again – 0:58
- Lo ze – 1:28
- Not even starting – 0:35
- it moves – 3:08
- Tikva Rishonit – 1:30
- Restart again – 2:23
- maybe – 1:53
- Moving – 1:41
- Mi – 0:30
- tikva ktana – 1:47
- again maybe – 1:31
- ze – 1:06
- restart (processed) – 1:45
- starting – 1:30
- oulai ze – 0:52
- Lithot – 3:21
- Zman – 3:25
- Tikva Reprise – 1:05
- starting to grow – 4:56
- Si – 1:44
- it starts – 3:44