Try describing the smell of your childhood dish. Language is catastrophically ill-equipped for this task. Although it has done extraordinary things within its jurisdiction, and its jurisdiction is vast, it was not built for this. It was built for coordination: for telling someone where the water is, for negotiating the terms of a trade, for establishing which berries are poison. 

Even in its most elevated form or in the hands of its most gifted practitioners, we can still feel the gravitational pull of the practical: words want to mean things. Specific, verifiable, communicable things. They want to point at objects in the world and say: that. And they are most comfortable when there is a that to point at.

Music has no that. It points sideways, or in some direction for which there is no such preposition. 

Listening to Etude Blue for the first time in my small room on a Tuesday night not too long ago, I saw myself laying on a field of grass with a lover in Central Park, even though I was in France, alone, and I have never set foot in New York. For some reason, this sequence of vibrations, this collection of unbridled sounds colonized my chest and tricked my brain into welcoming this entirely invented scene. Isn’t this free online teleporter the strongest rebellion against the finitude and chaos of insatiable time? 

Over the years, I have learned to take advantage of it. All of a sudden, I was six years old, standing in my grandmother's kitchen, watching her cut cookies into squares. Not rounds! She said “Non è originale!”. I could smell the air, the oven, I could see her beautiful crooked smile. I don't know why that particular progression holds the coordinates of that kitchen. Maybe it’s the imprecisions, the awkward silences between the notes. Because there is something completely ridiculous about Etude Blue.

I have absolutely no certainty that your response will resemble mine even remotely, and I would in fact be surprised if it did. Some of you may find this ridiculous, others beautiful. Some of you may not even like music. This is either a miracle or a trick, and the exhilarating thing is that the distinction does not matter.