CUNEIFORM CATCH-UP: HAPPY FAMILY - Flowing Yet Cunning / Fort Of Responsibility; Walking Through the Mire/ The Dark Forest (Kenichi Morimoto: piano)

The moment the "flowing" 7/8 phrase at the beginning of this piece came to Kenichi Morimoto, he felt confident it would become a strong composition. From there, the rest of the music unfolded almost unconsciously, with little deliberate effort involved in the writing process. The result was a beautiful piece that didn’t quite resemble anything in his usual musical vocabulary. The contrast between its "flowing" beginning and its unexpectedly "cunning" nature is what gave rise to the title.

‘Fort of Responsibility’ is even more dramatic and insistent, a repeated motif once again employed with variations of course!

A sibling of The Flying Man ’Walking Through the Mire’ was inspired by a recurring nightmare and Dutch keys man Jasper van’t Hof; it reminds me of early

The title “The Dark Forest” comes from a chilling idea in speculative thought: when encountering an alien civilization, the only way to ensure one’s own survival may be to strike first and erase the other. If the opposing civilization were less advanced, or if we could detect them before they detected us, Earth might still stand a chance. But the most effective survival strategy may simply be to erase every trace of ourselves—hiding in silence, unnoticed, like prey concealing itself in a dense jungle from predators. This is the essence of the “Dark Forest” theory: intelligent life may be widespread in the universe, yet we do not encounter it because each civilization has learned to mask its presence as completely as possible. This ballad is written from the perspective of the prey—holding its breath in fear of being discovered.