Carries Fire
Sessions recorded live, carrying what’s found inside, out.
Imagination maps an unseen world, where play, beauty, and time combine as food for the soul, meaning.
Keep reading →
Play participates in a real world. Quite apart from the normal reality with a point, spontaneity lifts our hearts and opens us to new inventions.
Beauty, too, refers to a real world that follows a sort of physics, a spirographic hologram with arrows pointing both out and in: “out” to the world, “in” to the subjective experience of the hearer.
Musical development implies time, and the mind can’t help but make a story. Stories and time weave together into meaning, the lifeblood of the soul, without which we cannot live.
Meaning fuels the desire to live. We create that together, and the power of recognizing some story, some meaning, together, amplifies it.
This cooperative environment of play opens us to happy accidents, fun little laughs from the divine mystery of the universe. Organization happens less like a pyramid and more like a flocking of birds, a fluid universe of shifting lights.
Structure and community build from the discipline of the art and the kindness bred of celebration, meaning, and story.
Go deeper →
When we create art together, we’re not “making things up.” We’re tapping into something real—patterns woven into the fabric of reality itself that become personally meaningful when we recognize them.
Think about it: are we really unique in the cosmos for needing meaning? Everything learns and grows through what matters to it. A plant grows toward light because it recognizes what serves life. Stars form from hydrogen because gravity finds its patterns. We’re just the most elaborate version of something that’s been happening since the beginning.
The need for meaning is how we engage with reality at all. We learn what has meaning for us through relationship and stories where we see ourselves reflected. This isn’t human psychology projected onto a neutral universe. It’s us participating in the universe’s own tendency toward greater complexity and connection.
From hydrogen to stars to planets to life to consciousness—that’s not random drift. There’s a directional arrow in evolution itself, an inherent creativity that we’re part of, not separate from.
When we watch a creative act, the little stops and starts of a story implied through an improvisatory musical process, and each have our individual interpretation, which feels personally significant to each of us, that’s a magical universe speaking and hearing at once.
Live creative work becomes a form of collective meaning-discovery. The uncertainty, emergence, and way patterns arise from improvisation become the very process through which new realities get born.
Psychedelic traditions understood this. They combined beauty with disorientation to create cracks in ordinary consciousness where deeper patterns become visible. Not just a depiction of altered states, but actively inducing them, opening the opportunity to make new connections between things that don’t normally go together.
The creative journey moves from individual discovery to shared illumination. Like the Hermit in the tarot, you carry the fire you’ve found in solitude out into community space where it can light the way for others. This card brought the idea to record an album live, and was the impulse behind the name Khoma Brut Carries Fire.
All of this is why streaming the album creation process matters beyond just documenting music-making. It’s creating public ritual around how meaning emerges, consciousness recognizes itself in new forms, and the individual voice becomes a collective resource.
The same inner knowing that turns inward for personal discovery turns outward for community transformation. Individual light becomes everyone’s light through shared creative practice.
We make meaning because the world makes meaning and we are the world making meaning.
Sessions
The sun emerged as quickly and with as much force as the monsoon that preceded it, and the world felt clean as the picnickers met at the edge of the forest. It never ceased to amaze them how quickly the sandy soil of the ancient valley drained and dried, allowing them to enjoy a seat on the ground, even as thunder rumbled in the distance from the receding storm.
Read the full storyShow less
They played cards, ate slowly, and some friends climbed a tall evergreen. One woman found a swing, an old board looped through on each side with ropes from a very high branch. She mostly swayed on the swing, but at times a few friends remembered games from their childhoods, rushing under her as they pushed her higher.
A contingent studied the small life that roiled the soil, lying on their bellies while another group formed an impromptu singalong with a guitar, a tiny drum, and a few people singing. They sang a Grateful Dead song exploring the mysteries of existence, life, and death. They sang a Khoma Brut song about a retreat from an attempted life change, a return to the familiar life. Then another by that artist, exploring the dissolution of a relationship. A few mosquitoes came out as dusk approached and the waning sunlight warmed them as it angled below the tall trees of the forest. The group fell silent for a time, heads buzzing like the insects coming awake around them.
The moment the sun sank below the horizon, the cool air pressed more firmly against their skin. As the sun left, they felt it time to do the same. They slowly packed up, full from feasting and play, and started the walk back to town. At the crossroads, the boundary between the forest and the town, at the boundary between day and night, they said bittersweet goodbyes and headed to resume domestic life.
We find our hero handing out pamphlets in the central square. The next day, two men in military uniforms slide under her door a picture of her handing out pamphlets in the square with a simple note written across it in red ink, “second warning.”
Read the full storyShow less
She’s continued to meet with those organized against the regime, despite the wishes of her mom, who begged her to stop. She does not know what to do and needs to talk to her mom, but she knows they’re listening in on her phone.
She decides to go on a walk by the river, along a busy street in the heart of the city. The day is clear, sunny, and frigid. A quiet man in a long jacket approaches her and asks if she knows the way to the underground. She looks at him quizzically. There is no underground in this city. He bends over, picks up a packet of matches off the ground, and hands them to her as he says, “I think you dropped these.” He turns and walks away.
Taking off her gloves, she removes a cigarette from her pack. The matchbook has an address written inside, which she memorizes as she lights her cigarette and burns it.
As she approaches the ornate house in a neighborhood once known for its extreme wealth, the door opens and a man just home from work, his tie loosened and the top buttons of his dress shirt undone, steps out and heartily greets her. “Welcome, I’m so glad you could make it. I made a great stew,” he says as he ushers her in the door. He offers her a drink.
He turns on symphonic music and explains under his breath that she is in danger, and that they are a group funded by anti-fascists from around the world organized to help smuggle political dissidents out of the country. They have spies inside of her dissident group and also within the security agency of the government, and know that she is about to be arrested.
They have to act fast. He instructs her to go home, shave her head, and wear baggy, masculine clothes. She may not bring any of her personal items, including her phone or passport, when she leaves her apartment for the final time this evening when she comes to meet him.
As she climbs into the car, it reminds her of one her friend used to drive in high school many years ago. Someone in the front hands her a passport, and they drive all night. The front passenger hands her a cell phone and schools her on her name, address, and identification number. She is now a young man traveling with his parents to visit his sick aunt in the neighboring country. He has a whole backstory she has to memorize quickly.
They approach the border crossing in the wee hours of the morning.
* * *
This entire music session has a weight, tension, and internality that evoked this entire story. The sense of the unknown is reflected in the cover art, as well, images of hell, devils, and things that might be scary to face.
Part of improvisation is sticking with art through these scary moments. When I start a set, I don’t know where it will go, but evoking these emotions in this way can be a way to face them and help neutralize fears.
The story of Starlight opens with a traveler lying in a reclining position on an airplane reflecting on how he found his place, his home, and the never-ending cycle of life and rebirth.
Read the full storyShow less
After landing on an island in the Caribbean, he watches the sunset as he has dinner. He goes out on the town, and tucked away in a cove, lit by fire, he finds a large dance on the beach and joins in the party.
He leaves with a group of new friends, and away from the lights of the party the sky is blanketed with stars. They see the Milky Way and reminisce about past journeys. He is reminded that telling stories is maybe the oldest form of entertainment.
The starlight glints and the soft crushing tide rolls in. They are surprised to see the sky begin to lighten. They have been out all night.
In the starlight by the beach on an island, you may encounter many beings like the ones described by the album cover.
Improvisation, indeterminacy in music, means that the audience hears what the musician plays at the same time as the musician, who is also part of the audience.
Read the full storyShow less
Chapel Room follows a very simple chord progression of I to IV, two chords that move into one another easily. This means that these two chords in progression are very open, which makes them popular as a simple motif for improvisation. The two chords are also closely related through the overtone series, from which we derive harmonic theory: the root of the I chord is one of the first overtones of the root of the IV chord.
This overtone series, being a part of nature, is sacred. The images in the lyrics of Chapel Room and Washed Away move from inside the chapel, where we encounter the light of the sun inside, to the California coast, where a sort of unintended redemption comes to the narrator of the tale.
The cover image combines many sun images, and an old plate or coin, into something that looks like the roiling surface of the sun inside a cool eye.
The improvisation of the Carries Fire sessions often starts with a motif created on the spot. This one, however, contains a musical motif that dates back at least to the Renaissance, and is probably much older based on its simplicity. It’s the motif in “Hit the Road Jack,” which is also referred to as “lament bass.”
Read the full storyShow less
The title of the album is a play on “lament.” First, lemon, then La Menta, which means “mint” in Spanish but also sounds just like “lamenta,” lament. So La Menta Limón, Lemon Mint, the flavor of a nice beverage, but with none of those ingredients, just music.
The cover lemons are taken from Cézanne, just because he was so good at painting lemons. The mint images are from old botanical drawings, so the entire image became a plate notating this new botanical musical creation.
There is something bittersweet about being a stranger in a strange land, being out of country. Travel and exploration feel exciting, falling headlong into the unknown like the holy fool, a sense of timelessness, being slightly out of place.
Read the full storyShow less
Out of Country evokes this paradox of experience, the joy and thrill of exploration, and the melancholy of isolation that is available when you don’t really know the culture where you are. Two sides of the same coin.
The celebration of arrival yields to a little rest, the deep call of whales in dreams which, upon waking, leads to immersion in a culture different from any you’ve ever experienced.
Improvisation means following where you are led, and sonically exploring all of these emotions and states without regard to the destination, only the step by step walk as a journey in a strange land.
Keep exploring