Young Elephants' Dance

From the very beginning, I imagined this piece as a kind of musical journey between continents. It brings together elements of African music, Indian influences, and reggae. That may sound like an unusual combination, but that was exactly the idea — to draw from different cultures and still make the whole thing feel like one coherent piece of music.

When I first wrote it, I simply didn’t have the means to realize the idea the way I heard it in my head. The conditions were too limited, and I didn’t have access to the right tools, sounds, or performers. The original demo was therefore much more modest. It also had no vocals, because I’m obviously not an African-style singer, an Indian vocalist, or a reggae performer.

It wasn’t until many years later, in the 2020s, that new tools finally gave me the chance to bring the original concept much closer to the way I had always imagined it. In the current version, the piece includes several vocal parts. Most of them are built around essentially the same lyric, although the reggae part is intentionally a little more ambiguous.

The track also has an EDM version. As I mentioned in the story behind the album, my original idea for the project was much more electronic. Over time, I moved away from that direction, but some of the pieces still sounded right to me in that kind of setting. That’s why, alongside the album version, this track also has its own electronic interpretation.