About:

“There’s always a room at the Dura Hotel.”
—————————————————————
Built within a sonic wormhole nestled in the foothills of the Swiss Alps of the mid 1300’s, the Dura Hotel has largely remained a mystery throughout its infinite existence as a retreat for musicians & composers. Since its opening, nearly every artist in the history of music has spent at least one haunted night wandering its cacophonous halls in search of inspiration and ideas. Most leave the way they arrive, frustrated, uninspired and empty handed. But there are those who come away enhanced by the experience, their minds permanently altered & expanded by it. Those who do not take for granted the gifts the Hotel has to give, but who graciously accept each moment, however discordant, in the spirit in which it was offered, as mana...
—————————————————————
In preparing to write these liner notes, I found myself wandering through the halls of our beloved Dura. This room moist in the corners. That room smelling faintly of opium & hasheesh. But every room vibrating in various sounds like shimmering wallpaper. Wallpaper containing, in code, much needed information from which these notes have been culled.
—————————————————————
I discovered one note in a greasy ledger:

"Paul was beheaded, and his decapitated head struck the earth thrice, and each place it struck, a spring of fresh water gushed forth."

I include it here because it seemed pertinent somehow.

—————————————————————-
Originally titled We Create Abnormal Music Album, The Dura Hotel began its life on Facebook in August of 2020. Several musicians took it upon themselves to create an album of music the sort that no one had ever heard before. It would be called (and loosely themed on) The Beheading of Saint Paul. But I’m getting ahead of myself. In the beginning, chaos reigned. They were aimless, but not for long.

Thanks to the general enthusiasm for the project by all involved, they soon hit some sort of stride and music began flooding in. The musicians formed various connections amongst themselves and went to work creating, submitting, remixing, dismembering & reassembling then resubmitting each other’s various tracks of music and sounds. Each person took on the mantle of various aspects of the production of the album as tasks required completion, everyone just sort of fell into place. Ideas were suggested & voted on and thus progress was made. Titles were created and a track order decided.

Time flew by at breakneck speed and soon the album was complete. But who was it by? What were we? WHO were we? Surely not the entirely too clunky “We Create Abnormal Music Album.” So, as with every other aspect of our creative process, the question was posed to the group for suggestions. A handful of suggestions trickled in, but one response was serendipitous.
“I had a dream a few weeks ago where someone asked me, ‘Are they still gonna call it The Dura Hotel?’ I don’t know what they were referring to, so maybe it was this?”

Maybe it hadn’t been at the time, but it definitely was now, because that’s exactly what we decided to call ‘It’. The ‘It’ being us, the us who are we, and we are...

The Dura Hotel

Liner notes by C. Lee T.
12/10/2020
Room 531