Here is the first part of the interview of someone very special for us : Wyatt Hopper, from the Research Institute for the Telepathic Hypothesis in Music (RITHM). The band did meet him a short time before his death. He was a kind, happy, loveable guy who dedicated a great part of his life to make music and, most specifically, to explore what he deamed as "telepathic occurrences" in musical composition. He founded the RITHM and was its princpal motor, always eager to experiment, share and marvel at what he'd find. He was kind enough to lend an ear to our music, and to reach out to us when we (jokingly) organized the first ever telepathic gig. We rapidly bonded. We were lucky enough to conduct a full interview of his views, life and approach to music before his departure. Our next album, Spectral Music, is dedicated to him. Here is a full transcription of this first part :
"I first stumbled on the notion of "telepathic music" when a friend of mine dreamt of a certain melody. We were good friends, composers or at least trying to be, and he went to me one morning and said : "What do you think of this ?" and he played it on my old upstraight piano. It was rather strange, an eerie melody that was both very tonal, very rooted in tonality, and emancipating itself very quickly of it. What stroke me the most was that part of that melody I already knew. I said : "play that part again", and he did. I said it reminded me of something, which is not particulary important in itself - everyone has bits and pieces of other's music in its scores - but kept coming to my mind. I remembered it, something in me struggled to associate the right memory to this bit of music. He said : "It came to me in a dream. I was doing a gig in a concert room, and everyone was really upset for a reason. I think that's because I was late, you know, or something. And I sat down at the piano, which was in the centre of the stage, I sat down and in a hurry I played that. It stucked in my head, for some reason, and here it is."
Days later I was still trying to figure out where I did hear that melody. I searched in Schoenberg, because I thought the tonality/atonality thing was something he could have done around the time he wrote "The Transfigured Night".  But I found nothing. I began playing it to others, asking : "Can you tell me where it's from ?", but nobody could tell. It was very frustrating : I remembered a piece that did'nt exist, you know. 
Until one day, of course, I found it. I had difficulties with a composition of mine called "Inauguration of an ocean", where something was needed for filling a particular space. It was a vast piece, a spectral music piece based on the analysis of a whale sound. I thought it was very clever at the time, but I don't think so anymore. Anyways, I was going nowhere with it and then I realised that, if I placed the melody my friend played me against that "sound" I made, it worked magically. I mean, it really was pure magic. The tonal part of the melody underlined an implied melody in the chaos of the sound, and it just beautifully faded in the next part. This is when I thought : oh, boy. This is weird. My friend dreamt a melody for me."

Wyatt Hopper (Research Institute for the Telepathic Hypothesis in Music) : interview, part one

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