Breathe Owl Breathe
How did we carve to this? I guess we whittled from the inside out at first, trying to cultivate and catapult these small songs over the castle wall…
With instruments, levers, wires, and the sturdy encouraging hands of friends, we formed the band / art project, Breathe Owl Breathe.
Before the band came together, we were all in different places working on different things. I was studying printmaking, Andréa was giving cello lessons, and Trevor was reading and making maps. When I first met Andréa we played music all day outside under a shady tree. Later that same day, we made a recording of short story songs inside a small messy room with drawings on the wall. The day I met Trevor, we played music inside a dorm room and later made a movie about zombies. The recording was a think piece; the movie was a romantic comedy; and we were friends forever (at
least).
The name Breathe Owl Breathe came from a dream I had. There was an owl that was cutting its way through the cold, still night. (Whoever was in charge of the cinematography of the dream—my hat?s off to them.) It was from the perspec-tive of just above a field mouse scurrying through blades of grass. The mouse then found a little divot in the ground, laid down on its back, and gave its last breath. The breath rose up into the sky, passing by the owl?s beak. The owl gave a
breath, turned its head, and decided to fly away. Suspended in the air, I watched the owl weave its way out of sight, flapping three flaps on one wing before switching to the other wing to do the same. I had never seen a bird fly that way. I woke up and wrote “Breathe Owl Breathe” on the windowsill with a ballpoint pen, then fell back to sleep. The pen was out of ink, so the writing (I discovered the next morning) was more of an indentation of the words into wood. I called Andréa up, she wrote down Breathe Owl Breathe, the dream came back, and we had ourselves a name.
