It’s a particularly significant design for me, as it represents elements such as the anonymous chaos found in the nature of a crowd, the structural distance of buildings built on top of each other, with time passing us by like brushing flashes of bright yellow. The turquoise circular ocean stream stands as a higher peace holding everything together. I found it a poetically moving balance between the complex yet simplistic reflection of a synchronized reality, but at the same time, it is a distressing representation of our dystopian abandonment to the societal status quo and personal hopelessness. Whatever it is, there’s no right or wrong; it’s the song being felt on multiple degrees of layered sensations, and it’s for everyone to keep on defining (and redefining) its meaning.

– Alex

The Pain That Bonds (The Beginning Is the End) is a segment of a much longer essay called “The Haunting Measure of Sorrows With Which We Feed our Deepest Need for Illusionary Dystopia in Time of Emotional Reality Disconnection”, which I wrote on the morning I acknowledged what life was, after spending about a week in complete isolation inside a little room of the Tangier guest house I was then living in.


I actually don’t remember much of the very first few weeks that marked my arrival in North Africa. The colors, like the emotions they were reflecting, were so blurry that everything looked distant and imperceptible for a while, a state of mind that would ultimately establish the foundation for most of the initial writing that became “Windows in the Sky”.

The Pain That Bonds (The Beginning Is the End) is dealing with that inner struggle between a complete abandonment to the necessity of addressing the numerous ghosts I kept adding to my life and simply keeping the slow-paced abdication to the self-destroying condition of my total absence of courage to set myself free from that profound sorrowful desperation.

It had become as uncomfortable as it was disquieting for me to contemplate reality, especially that it felt like being a different individual witnessing a long tragedy of silence and time passing by without feeling anything but the paradoxes of anger and powerlessness, all while cultivating a life of cynicism and fatalistic non-interventionism.

The lyrical narrative of the song progresses from an impassive reflection that displays an intimate confession of a relinquished resignation, a kind of conscious hopefulness about the measure of life and the ambiguity of our faith in what’s intangible, as if whatever beliefs – much like any creation that bloomed from personal ambition – wasn’t enough to stand before the honesty of despair, that regardless of how hard and resilient we might be, there’s no answer to the truth we need to create for ourselves in order to keep on going on, wherever it may lead.

My father’s passing was also the admittance of a greater loss in a way, as I realized I was the last in line holding that name. Bloodline, youthful dreams, old promises, and sincere vows… What are those as we face grief and pain, the only things that make us all equal? Like time holding its contriving share, everything we think we are or have, above and beyond, is only the static of our own disillusions turned into clamoring make-believes. After all, there’s no need for the sun when we’ve learned to worship the neon light we can craft so easily. 

Those reflections were the evil sorrows I was sharing my life with and they were truly the only friends I had at that point. They shaped the droning sounds in the song as much as they defined what might be described as its dark and somber vibe. For me, it’s a sonic reflection of how I saw the people of Tangier embrace the notion of death and loss, from streets processions to weekly paying respect to their loved ones who have passed with flowers, from a Muslim cemetery a street corner away from a Hebraic and a Christian one, as if the importance to remember the ones who are no longer here is our need to acknowledge the meaning of our own lives.

The journey for “Windows in the Sky” truly became one, and not just a collection of songs assembled together, the moment I added those words as I was recording the vocal tracks:


A man is falling, falling, falling on his knees
A man is falling, falling, falling on his knees
A man is falling, falling, falling on his knees
A man is falling, falling, falling on his knees
A man is falling, falling, falling, falling, falling on his knees
A man is falling, falling, falling, falling, falling on his knees

For me, it meant that however often we may have to fall – and we all do somehow – it’s only once we kneel before our own humanity that life, like the death it carries, can happen, marking the end of what may be the essence of the most secretive and intimate denial of what we don’t know, what we hold on to so fiercely, of how creatively imaginative we become to avoid the light and thus never have our real selves become exposed in its brightness, regardless of what we think or believe. And it takes a great measure of courage to allow oneself to be that honestly vulnerable…