This album is the third in a trilogy for Real World. "Weaving My Ancestors’ Voices" was about the birth of an idea to explore the way in which vocal techniques could lead between each other, and how it would be possible to cross those boundaries within a single word or a single phrase. "The Zen Kiss" became a kind of flowering of that. So many people have asked me where the inspiration for the idea came from that, in a way, I’m going back to the land of the unborn on this album, the fallow point, in order to answer them. And also to the concept of the crone with the cauldron, to the cyclic and melting pot nature of everything within the cauldron. Of course, the crone represents the creator.

When you set up a structure like a drone, not only do you set up a cyclic principle but you also set up a melting pot because, in the very bones of the drone, if you like, are the harmonics which provide the inspiration for the melodies. Harmonics are magical things and are omnipresent on this album.

People who don’t create regularly from scratch, critics or journalists who interpret others’ work for example, in my experience, find it difficult to understand that most creators do not create from a little bit of this and a little bit of that, but that they create from a place of nothingness where things spontaneously arise.

That is the place of the unknowable and in our lives it is very difficult to live with what is not known (yet), even though "I don’t know" is essential to true change and new growth. Instead, we’re taught to find the answers to everything, and we have to quantify everything, we have to have the cash flow chart for the next five years!

Things don’t happen like that, but we run our lives as if they do and that’s why our lives break down. And when our lives break down who do we turn to? We turn to the artist to express our pain, we turn to the artist to provide inspiration, but I think we turn to the artist because on a psychological level we know that the artist is comfortable living with the unknown. The artist has had to face the unknown, had to make a living today out of something which didn’t exist yesterday, and we take comfort from that.