Bill Laurance: Lumen

It's not often you get to record alone in a church at 3am. I'm not religious, but I experienced something unique when I played at night while the streets around me were asleep. It felt like the music was telling me what to play and I was the passenger. Lumen emerged from a variety of compositional seeds - from through-composed songs that remain faithful to the score and leave little room for freedom, to wide-open improvisations recorded in the moment without committing anything beforehand. It is the space between composition and improvisation where the magic happens - and where the music can lead if the musicians are ready for it. I recorded day and night on a Yamaha grand piano and an upright felt piano. It felt like a kind of solo retreat: sitting up all night in a building of faith, immersing myself deeper and deeper in the music. When I finally emerged, I had a deep sense that it was the music that had led me, and not the other way around.