After ArtIFact I went a full year without writing any songs, though I scribbled a lot. During that time I returned to working boring jobs in Germany, spent two great weeks in Northern Italy, moved back to Ecuador to do a stint with Radio HCJB, and went on a three-month hitch hiking tour of Patagonia (and other parts of South America). I was moved and inspired by my experiences there, but I was also broke, so I returned to Europe to find a job. buy it!

During the time that most of these were written (late summer 2000) I was working in a factory in southern Britain and trying in my songs to harmonize the beauty that was still filling my head from my travels (Patagonia mostly) with the drudgerous existence that a well-adjusted citizen seems to be condemned to accept. People have told me that the album is very “down”; it tries to depict a search for timelessness and liberation from limitations, with tentative suggestions that it is in following beauty that we find ourselves searching our Liberator. Perhaps it seems “down” because it spends so much time contemplating the gulf and posing the problem so many times: that the gifts we are given do not come accompanied by the conditions in which to enjoy them, so that they often seem more tantalizing than fulfilling.

In contrast to ArtIFact (which was thrown together over a couple of weekends), I worked on and off for almost two years on “Thirst”. Since I could do the editing on my own time but did not have unlimited access to studios or musicians, I let them play a few takes in the studio, without really correcting them. These served as raw material to work with in the cutting room. Basically, then, all these songs are sound collages.

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