OUT OF THE BLUE - Transforming hurt into love.

Release date: Out Of The Blue was released on December, 1, 2023.

Genre: Compositional Ambient / Esoteric Ambient

The album’s story:

Out Of The Blue - Zen Buddhism as a catalyst for both individual and collective enlightenment

This album is the first album of a trilogy I am writing on the topic of transcending human suffering and chasing moments of bliss.

Out Of The Blue is about finding individual as well as collective enlightenment.

Enlightenment may sound like an ambitious word, but I found it to be the exact opposite of having the blues.

It's about transcending heaviness and dread and turning these into higher vibrations.

The feeling of putting your coat in the closet after a long winter.

Music:

Artwork & Images:

Bio:

Antony Reynaert is an avant-garde composer, guitarist, and educator with a passion for creating innovative and thought-provoking music.

MUSICAL JOURNEY

Born in the coastal town of Ostend, Belgium, Antony's musical journey began with classical piano at the age of seven. His passion for the guitar was ignited at fourteen, inspired by punk and metal riffs. This led him to practice intensely and delve into the depths of blues, studying legendary guitarists like Jimi Hendrix, Jeff Beck, and David Gilmour.

Antony's compositions blend free-form structures, seamlessly integrating elements of blues, classical music, and free jazz. His work transcends traditional genres, offering listeners an immersive experience that is both captivating and unconventional. Inspired by Zen Buddhism, Antony's music explores the interplay between sound and silence, evoking a sense of calm and introspection.

ARTISTIC INSPIRATION

Drawing from various art forms and philosophical influences, Antony's compositions are deeply rooted in his quest to explore the spiritual realm. His innovative approach to guitar playing and composition challenges norms and opens new pathways for auditory exploration. Antony's latest album, Out Of The Blue, is the first in a trilogy focused on transcending human suffering and chasing moments of bliss through music.

EDUCATOR AND MENTOR

Beyond his work as a composer and performer, Antony is passionate about education. He is committed to nurturing the next generation of musicians, sharing his knowledge, and inspiring students to discover their own creative voices. After countless hours of practice and extensive guitar study in the US, Antony became a respected authority on music education. Today, he leads Belgium's acclaimed Gitaar Training Studio, guiding both novice and experienced players.

His goal in life is to introduce people to the spiritual realm through his music and help them understand free-form creativity as a life force.

“I believe we’ve strayed far from our paths as modern humans because we’ve been focusing too much on the physical realm. I want to point the way to the spiritual realm in a way that’s fun and easy to grasp.”

- Antony Reynaert

Story behind the tracks:

  1. Into The Rabbit Hole

    When starting to write for my new album, I found myself intrigued by adventurous styles such as avant-jazz and free jazz.

    I was mostly attracted by the nonconformism of free jazz and I had the feeling that these styles could help me find my own voice as a musician in some way.

    As a musician, I was always intrigued by improvisation, instead of relying on black dots on a page.

    I felt like the ideology of free jazz could help me define my musical vision more clearly.

    Defining that vision was necessary because, as a musician, oddly enough I never liked playing my own songs.

    Whenever I was both the composer and the performer in a mainstream band I felt ‘enslaved’ to my own compositions.

    While a lot of my peers would die to tour with a big band, to me these bands would be the modern-day equivalent of a slave orchestra.

    I came across the concept of slave orchestras while researching the borders between classical and blues.

    Interestingly enough, it looks like Classical music and blues have more in common than they probably would like to admit.

    Musically, I aspired to move to a place where the performer has all the freedom, so I wouldn’t have to feel like a monkey performing a circus act when performing my songs.

    So when I started writing for Out Of The Blue, I looked for nonconformist ways to break out of my old beliefs and habits surrounding music.

    While I was experimenting with loops and more free-form ways of creating, I found myself at the same time listening to classical music a lot.

    What I found upon introspection was that my musical upbringing served both as the catalyst, but also as the oppressor of my current work.

    Into The Rabbit Hole was the first composition were I took a deep dive into my psyche and the first attempt to turn my DIY psycho-analysis into music.

  2. Reformation

    While I’m happy to have received my formative years in the classical world, I always struggled with the often toxic attitude about music in that environment.

    For example, during my fourth year of piano studies, my teacher told me I couldn’t participate in the yearly recital because I didn’t practice enough.

    My parents were at the time divorcing and you simply don’t practice in a living room where there’s fighting.

    A clear lack of empathy from the piano teacher’s side (hint: if kids are crying during your music lessons, maybe you should ask them what’s up), made me drop out of piano lessons.

    But still, years later I found myself musically inhibited when composing.

    And while, of course, there are many great teachers teaching at such classical institutions, many music traditions today are still rooted deeply in a binary view of ‘good’ versus ‘bad’.

    I studied classical piano for four years (I started classical piano at 7 years old), but my parent’s divorce and my own lack of conformity to the system drove me in another direction.

    The title ‘reformation’ refers to the personal transformation I went through during the writing of the album, based on me diving into my formative years as a musician.

    On a bigger scale, it’s about the much needed reformation of our institutes (music education to name one).

  3. Daddy Is Turning His Hurt Into Love, Honey

    During my teenage years, toxic teachers, and my parent’s divorce formed me into a punk.

    But as painful as it was, my parent’s divorce opened up some great possibilities.

    For example, when I was about to travel to Spain with my girlfriend at the time, we broke up before the trip.

    It was my dad that suggest I could take my sister instead, who at the time was fourteen.

    Before his divorce, my dad made a bigger, and most of all stricter, contribution to our upbringing.

    Being raised by a very strict dictator-like father himself, when he felt in the dark about parenting he became more conservative than his personality really is (he is amongst the most good-hearted people I know).

    In an attempt to break away from his past, divorcing my mother served as a stepping stone for him to form an identity.

    He found that identity in the Mediterranean atmosphere of the South of France.

    He didn’t move there, but he embraced the lifestyle as a way to get away from his militant upbringing.

    My mother instructed him to move to a nearby campsite where he lived in a camper car in an attempt that he would come to his senses.

    Instead, his newfound love often joined him at that campsite, drinking red wine until it was time to call it a night.

    When it became clear that the relationship with my mother was beyond repair, he moved to a house right around the corner from our house.

    The first day I and my sister went there, his new girlfriend was already there. She couldn’t leave him one second with his kids.

    It became clear that she suffered from morbid jealousy, as she later cut the laces from my sister’s shoes and made clothes disappear when we weren’t looking.

    She wasn’t mentally healthy and clearly saw me and my sister as a threat to her relationship with my father.

    The co-parenting schedule that my parents worked out dictated that every 14 days we had to spend the weekend with my dad.

    But it’s not that these weekends were all rainbows and unicorns.

    Often times he was at work (he worked at his desk in the living room) and we had to find a way to keep ourselves busy.

    One day I brought my electric guitar and my small practice amp. With all my pride from practicing every day, I set myself up in his living room and started playing my best Metallica riffs. He got furious.

    The clash of the generations was real. While their generation could upset their parents by playing the Beatles, metal was the crossing line of what my dad conceived as music.

    Because he lived only a hundred meters away from my mothers’ house, we often returned back to that house on those weekends we had to be with dad.

    But my mother was fighting her own battles and often said: “when it’s your dad’s weekend, you can’t come here.”

    So every other weekend we felt homeless in a sense. We weren’t welcome with father and we weren’t welcome with mother.

    In defense of my mother, the reason why she wanted space was that she was always giving a 100% to her children and her work at school.

    And of course, she felt the hurt, not only from what my dad put her through but from her own unhealthy childhood, which is another story.

    But even though our upbringing was fucked up, I don’t feel regret at all.

    Because as messed up as things were, there were a lot of good things coming for us as well.

    For example, when my dad divorced and entered his days of romantic renaissance, he also became more accommodating to our lives.

    Instead of being ever-present in our upbringing, we only had to deal with him every 14 days.

    So I spend my teenage years sitting on the street with my friends, skateboarding, and blowing weed.

    The track its title, ‘Daddy Is Turning His Hurt Into Love, Honey’, is pretty self-explanatory and thus deals with how trauma is carried intergenerationally until resolved.

  4. Prelude

    In the ’90s, you had two types of households.

    The first was deeply rooted in Christianity, where the parents locked their kids up, and spoiled them with video games and other perks, in order to not make them fall for the evils of drugs, booze, etc.

    Then you had the household of the free-ranging kids, where the parents didn’t know what the fuck their kids were doing.

    Thanks to my dad’s midlife crisis I could have such a life.

    Together with a dozen friends we roamed the streets in order to cope with our boredom.

    Rage against the machine managed to sum up our aversion to the system.

    Not only the band, but the entire notion of their message was what we embraced.

    The idiocy of giving into a system that was designed to subtract the earth from its natural resources with higher efficiency and to enslave its habitants with more effective forms of control.

    The irony of working your ass off to save for a golden retirement that you’d never collect (my uncle died of a heart attack during my teenage years, he was just 52).

    The reality was that we were amongst the luckiest generations that ever lived.

    Amongst all of the shit from parents and teachers we wholeheartedly rejected, we were lucky to mess around as much as we did.

    We were probably the last generation that could roam in everything life had to offer, instead of living a curated version of the world carefully selected and controlled by parents.

    When I was fourteen I wanted to go to a rather big music festival, but of course, due to their age, none of my friends could go from their parents.

    But my mom, the hero that she is, told me I should go by myself.

    So fast forward to today, where I’m making up the balance of my influences and upbringing.

    When I started the writing process for the new record, I felt in the dark about what musical direction to take, because I had so many influences.

    The electric guitar turned out to be my weapon of choice and looking back to my teenage years, this shouldn’t come as a surprise after I realized I could drive my dad bonkers with it.

    Moreover, the guitar became a way of expressing the hurt that I felt as a teenager.

    So that instrument stuck with me because of that.

    That’s also the reason why I specialized in blues guitar playing because I liked the expressiveness of the style.

    The non-conformity of punk is another thing that really spoke to me during my teenage years.

    When I started rehearsing with Dieter, our Drummer, I felt like putting all of my influences together, but at the same time I felt like ‘fucking things up’.

    That’s around the time I stumbled on how the punk movement of the 80s was in fact inspired by free jazz.

    How Lou Reed expressed his inspiration through people like Ornette Coleman.

    When I started out I was inspired by people like Ornette Coleman. He has always been a great influence- Lou Reed

    The track Prelude is testimony of my punk mentality, where I’m throwing rocks at (but also embracing) my classical upbringing and the jazz elitist mentality I clashed at with one particular teacher.

    Moreover, it’s my contribution to better mental health protection for musicians and music students in particular by coming clean with my story about being publicly cyberbullied by this teacher, as recorded in this essay I wrote.

  5. Out Of The Blue

    Before writing the album, I went through life like the majority of people.

    I was constantly filling the void and covering up my hurt with ego outings.

    Every time I felt that existential void nagging at me, I covered it up with thinking, working, buying, scrolling…

    What I realized by taking the plunge into the rabbit hole of my psyche is that this nagging feeling is a gateway to go deeper.

    It’s an invitation to transform your hurt and live in the now.

    When my daughter was 2 years old, I remember feeling absent when I played with her.

    I tried, but couldn’t really enjoy the moment.

    It was too hard, because I carried around a thick layer of hurt and trauma, that I tried to cover up with my ego.

    I believe that collectively, what got us here today, is exactly this.

    We’ve build everything to serve our ego.

    We fill that existential void by buying, scrolling, binging, etc. so we don’t have to look at our hurt.

    So we don’t have to feel.

    We create companies to fill the void, so other people can fill their void with the products created in the process of running away from our feelings.

    Out of the blue as title track of the album represents the hopeful notion that “ego got us here, hurt will liberate us”.

    It’s a welcome invitation to look at both our individual as well as collective depression and burn-out as a gateway to liberation and positive change instead of only seeing the negatives.

    Also, the track brings me back to the piano.

    About 6 weeks before recording the album I was home alone, listening to Max Richter while I started crying.

    I cried because I had wasted 23 years of my life trying to master an instrument that looks like a giant penis.

    I started playing piano for the love of music…

    But the guitar I played because of ego-driven reasons.

    Because I didn’t belief I could get people to like me for whom I was.

    So this musical phallic symbol attracted me.

    I got back to the piano weeks before recording Out Of The Blue.

    The title track was supposed to be driven by guitar, but when we recorded it, it kind of felt wrong.

    Peter, the producer, told me my guitar playing sounded like Eddie Hazel (from Parliament / Funkadelic).

    Not knowing I didn’t want to sound like a Hendrix-clone, it stang.

    I came home that night and recomposed the piece for piano.

    For some strange reason I feel like when I play piano, it sounds like me.

    My piano teacher didn’t allow me to hold down the reverb pedal as a kid, so I pressed it hard.

  6. Canvas

    This was something that I wanted to do for a long time: to go in the studio without having any idea about the end result.

    For Canvas we didn’t have the faintest idea what we were going to do…

    This was by design.

    I felt the need to really prove it to myself that I could color outside the lines.

    I believe this is the curse of music education rooted in toxism: you become afraid of coloring outside the lines.

    It might take years of introspection (as it did with me), to escape these dogmas.

    I’m glad that with this album I finally managed to escape the tyranny of likeability, rhythm, melody, structure, etc.

    The cover of the album is testimony of both this escape…

    The newfound freedom to color outside of the lines…

    But at the same time it represents the canvas I created to capture these musical ideas on.

    Picasso was right when he said:

    “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.”

  7. Meditations (On Energy Conservation)

    We need to talk about both our individual and collective problems…

    Seriously.

    I know there’s already much talk going on…

    But it’s not enough.

    It only scratches the surface.

    I believe there’s a big connection between what we’re experiencing as a whole and our individual lives.

    My mom raised me and my sister on a steady diet of spiritual wisdom.

    After the divorce, she collected a group of awakened friends that often came into our house.

    One of the lessons most valuable lessons we learned was the idea, stemming from Buddhism, was this:

    Life is a mirror.

    Nothing is what it seems…

    Sometimes the outside world is a representation of your inside world.

    Sometimes your inside world represents the outside world.

    But the two are connected.

    So in Meditations (On Energy Conservation) I sat with the idea that Europe’s energy crisis might have a message for us individually.

    At least for me it message was loud and clear:

    Stop wasting your energy chasing things that don’t matter.

    Stop giving away your energy to others by letting them fuck with your borders.

    I think it’s one of the biggest lessons we currently need to learn: to stop inflating our own value, and giving away our energy (individually and collectively).

    I don’t want to get too politically, but it’s a fact that Europe could’ve done a better job of not being so reliable on energy from outside of the continent.

    Maybe we need to learn to not be so reliable on others too for our energy on an individual level.

    Maybe we need to go inside the rabbit hole and search for our true value, instead of letting others dictate what we are worth.

    And yes it’s painful.

    And even thought I am fighting my own battles, you could say I’m privileged.

    But nobody is free from this struggle, that is why awakening needs to happen on both an individual and collective level.

  8. When Autumn Leaves Start To Bloom

    My first idea for this track was to make a desolate version of Autumn Leaves as a way to shine a light on Climate Change.

    It was supposed to be me, throwing more rocks to the jazz elite (yes, they are real).

    The central idea was this: “how can you be so vain to worry about what scale to play over ‘this and that’ chord' and to pray to the musicians that are the kings of this vanity, while we’re torching the world”.

    Ok, I admit…

    It was too much.

    And it turned out differently.

    Because I’m really no different than the knights of ego.

    My entire success story is based on a simple formula:

    Grief…

    Turned into anger…

    Taken into workaholism.

    Oh the joys of self-knowledge.

    So I decided to name this track ‘When Autumn Leaves Start To Bloom’, refering to the idea that when you put down your mantle of ego, you make way to good things.

    I believe it’s our moral obligation to clean up the shit we are carrying with us, individually and collectivelly.

    This is where we are as humanity I think.

    Our dark sides are what make us into what we are.

    Without darkness, there’s no light.

    Without cleaning up that dirt, we aren’t able to tap into our real emotions.

    That’s why the role of artists is so needed in our society.

    It’s not petty or trivial, it’s necessary.

    Because as an artist you are forced to look within, and deal with the dirt you carry around.

    And hopefully you inspire others to do so themselves.

    So I’m all for raising kids like artists, which is a discussion for another time.

    In a bigger context, ‘When Autumn Leaves Start To Bloom’ is about humanity.

    Because no matter how faded we are, we can start to bloom again.

    I composed this piece for solo piano, as an act to celebrate the rekindling of the musical garden I carry within.

    I believe we all carry this musical garden within, but it’s hard to tap into it if you are instructed to ‘play the right notes’.

    Whenever I touch the piano now I feel like I’m guided.

    Or maybe the 25 years in my personal dessert of oppression, trauma & ego was necessary to loose my fear of playing the wrong notes.

    Maybe the blues is a tool to transform.

    Maybe the collective lessons we get from the blues (trauma, oppression, etc.) is just what we need.

    Maybe we need to start listening more to what the world wants to tell us, so we can bloom like never before.

  9. Forever Part II

    The last track of the album has a particular double meaning.

    First it’s my attempt to immortalize a personal friend, who I feel never left.

    I will write about the importance of this friendship to my work in the future.

    Secondly, it relates to the escape of oppression and trauma, thus liberation.

    Even thought it’s an ambitious word, I like the name that spiritual people use: ‘enlightenment’.

    Athletes refer to this state as ‘into the zone’ or artists use ‘flow’.

    I see enlightenment as the exact opposite of having the blues.

    The feeling of putting your coat in the closet after a long winter.

    I look forward seeing where we’ll end up as humanity as we overcome our collective state of depression and burn-out.

    I think depression can hold tremendous value.

    In the words of Jim Carrey:

    Depressed = Deep rest. Your body needs deep rest.

    Our collective body (mother earth) needs rest.

    Because it doesn’t want to live this fake life anymore…

    Where the ego rules.

    I hope I get to live the day we get there…

    Out of our collective hurt.

    Out of slavery.

    Out of the blue.

    Album Credits:

    All songs written by Antony Reynaert

    Guitars, pianos and soundscapes: Antony Reynaert

    Drums & percussion: Dieter Sabbe

    Recorded, mixed & produced by Peter Desmedt (@Studio Ledeberg)

    Mastered by Uwe Teichert (@Electropolis)

    Artwork by Bamsway

    Photography by Stef Reynaert

    Special thanks to the love of my life Liesbeth Dhondt

    In loving memory of Annie De Lille