House Building.

 Several highlights in the past week - all good.

We did quite a bit of homework for the SoAlive conference where we'll be attending a few workshops, a few speed meetings with booking agents from across the European continent, and also perform a 45-minute set to hopefully build a music bridge into new lands. What happens, happens. One of the things we did was to take a good look at the delegates list (both manually and using Claude, our AI partner of choice) and create a shortlist of people we should get in touch with and why. The list was shared and double-checked by Deni who's also working on bridges for local bands. There's going to be a workshop on the process of releasing IDLES' latest album (TANGK) - another lucky coincidence because we constantly quote them as one of our inspirations. Of course, it won't be the band themselves, but still getting a peep into "the creative process, strategic decisions and marketing strategies that brought this highly anticipated album to life" should be very exciting and educational.

Perhaps the biggest news of the week was a meeting we had with our top choice for the producer of our next album. It's Georgi Stanev - Gogo. For the people involved with the local scene - no introduction is necessary. But the key reasons why we decided to coyly propose the idea to him were his work with one of the best produced bands in Bulgarian independent scene - Gravity Co, the crystal smoothness and the harmonic emotional fireworks in his own music project Lavasonic, endless proven knowledge of everything audio and, most of all, being a humble, introspective and transparent human. Our favorite kind. Everything we talked about is only good signs: loving mistakes, letting each band member's expression reflect on the product, doing it for the sake of music not commerce, and enjoying the journey. The best part - we got invited to a mystic house next summer to spend a week focused on nothing but laying some tracks on tape. A dream come true for some of us. Of course, nothing is final and not much has been done yet (if anything), but the signs are promising and inspiring. It seems like we're building a family - the House of ALI, if you wish, where people like Gogo, Stefo, Mitko, Deni, our families and many other people will hopefully have a joint sense of ownership of whatever ALI is.

We're still not ready to reveal the identity of the new band addition. We'll probably do that once we've completed all the gigs we're planning to do with Kalo. But - we are already rehearsing together, not wasting time. If you put a gun to our head, we'd probably be able to play 5-6 songs of the album on a stage, but we won't rush things until the level of comfort is where it feels right. Mostly for the new addition. Plenty of work to do still, let's not be naive and underestimate the complexity of the situation. So far so good, though.

Turns out our entire audio material weighs around 500GB. It's the album, of course, but also several songs which we need to figure out how to get off the hard drives and into everyone's audio receptors. Some are closer to being release-ready, some farther away - but we promise to find a way. Depending on how you count them, we have 15-20 songs that we know off and are either going to be part of the next album, or released separately and sooner. The important part is that it gives us something to look forward to and play around getting the juices flowing and scratching the creativity/curiosity itch.

Finally, we have a scheduled dinner with Kalo early next week where we'll seek ways to harmonize between his need for family time and, I guess, the House of ALI. The emotions are in the right place, there's full, common understanding of all circumstances, now it's just a question of aligning dreams with the physical limitations of what we perceive as a time-space continuum.