I started out wanting to make some songs. Singing, they say, probably preceded language and I’m interested in this transition from pure vocal sound to meaning as a musical gesture. Only birds know how to call the sun and they do it every morning is a sort of science fictional concept album that witnesses the forming of a consciousness and its passing through various (altered) states along a journey of discovering the world. This story, as told through the lyrics created together with Maikon K, draws on three main sources of inspiration that criss-cross, forming a web of images within the work:

1. Language development in baby humans - we learn to speak by exercising the vocal muscles in playful ways. Making sounds with the mouth is instinctive and pleasurable at first, then we start to add meaning, in order to be more precise about what it is that we want. Language is a sort of shorthand that makes navigating the world easier, because we can only ever approximate.
2. Mystical experience and language - in some altered states of consciousness, semantics can dissolve and our speech can take on new dimensions, becoming glossolalia, a nonsensical babble not unlike that of a baby.
3. Artificial intelligence and language - people say AI will one day be vastly more intelligent than humans, but as no AI currently understands what it is saying, we could posit that the algorithms are actually ‘speaking in tongues’. Indeed, if an AI spews out information that turns out to be false we say that it has ‘hallucinated facts’. Mystical experience?

Only birds know how to call the sun and they do it every morning brews these themes and others into a weird cosmi-sonic soup, connecting residues of my very fresh adventures in parenthood, some mystical experiences and an ongoing interest in AI-as-topic. The vocal part makes use of two techniques (the vocoder and the talkbox) for creating synthetic song between sense and nonsense and the 50ish minutes of electronic music, performed live by a quartet of voice/synth, EWI, MIDI/electric guitars and MIDI percussion, continues the playfully experimental soundworld that I first explored on my solo album All Culture Is Dissolving from 2021.