Silence as a starting point. I remember the Christmas of 2011, I was lying in the dark on a beach in Equador listening to the sound of the waves of the Pacific Ocean. Every time a wave crashed I was surprised by the deafening sound it produced breaking over hundreds of metres. It was as if the sky were falling in on the sea. At that time I had just started playing the lute and I was trying to find my sound. I let the ocean guide me, observing the importance of the moment just before the wave broke. It was as if that moment just before contained the same power of what was to come. . Another element which was important in finding my sound was time. Every time period has its own relationship with silence. In the Renaissance the absence of noise, like when cicadas ceased their song, could be more striking than a modern day burglar alarm is for us. Like the darkness sought by the blowing out of a candle, where silence was hiding at the end of an exhale. Interrupting me in my meditations in Equador, the dog that merited the image on the front cover came towards me from the sea, just like the sound I was searching for. Where this dog was headed I do not know, but I imagined a wood, and a free spirit.