On Totems: Begin at the beginning... O the dreams and feelings (that haunt and herald the corners) of our restless, shifting lives; how they often descend without rhyme or reason, making themselves unavoidable, scratching to achieve some sort of form, some crooked perfection in an imperfect world. These are the things that gently push us towards creation, spark the first swirlings, how difficult to trace their path it is. In other words: sometimes the edges of things aren't always salient and the path isn't necessarily always straight. Formless (and often in dreams or reveries) the inklings that hatched these recordings originally came into being. What initially seemed a definite structure for this album went through many changes. Often arrangements and orders would deconstruct themselves back down to the germ, only to reassemble into a new collection of songs, chants, and dog-ears of experience. Essentially, these songs are well-travelled. Some began as piano tinkerings in the cloudy, wet, chestnut fall of northern Italy, or as acoustic contemplations of curses left on the side of the darkling road in Los Angeles. Some came from staring into a starry abyss with the best of friends, others from contemplations of energy in the METRO. Still others came over the dream-transistor in fragments and feelings, auguring dimensions of the future (and of nowhere). Many of these lyrics happened once-upon-a-time, (some have yet to possibly happen). Some grew undoubtedly from nurs