I Didn’t Find One Face. I Found an Entire World.

“I want to invite you for a weekend of meditation, chanting and channeling. Together, we’ll record the voices of the Thirteen Grandmothers.”

The moment I heard myself say it, I almost laughed.

Anyone who has ever produced music knows how ridiculous this sounded.

Normally, you don’t invite musicians into a studio without music.

You write the songs first. You work out the melodies and harmonies. You create arrangements. You rehearse. And only then, when you more or less know what you are doing, you start recording.

I knew this process well. I had been making music for years.

But this time, I wanted to do the opposite.

I didn’t want to compose first.

I wanted to listen.

The faces had begun to make sounds

It started with the paintings.

For years, I had been searching for the face of Queen Sheba. I drew her again and again, trying to find a woman who felt real to me—not the exotic fantasy I kept encountering in other people’s images, but a sovereign woman I could believe in.

That search eventually led me beyond Sheba herself.

More women began to appear in my drawings. Different faces, different energies, different expressions of the feminine.

And somewhere along the way, something unexpected happened.

I began to hear them.

Not literally as voices speaking to me, but as different vibrations. Each archetype seemed to carry her own rhythm, her own emotional landscape, almost her own musical language.

The search for Queen Sheba’s face had quietly become a search for her voice.

And then for the voices of thirteen feminine archetypes.

These would eventually become The Thirteen — Healing Sounds of the Grandmothers, a musical project inspired by Kabbalistic traditions and by the ancient wisdom carried through feminine lineages.

The problem was that I had no idea what the music was supposed to sound like.

So instead of pretending that I did, I invited musicians to come and discover it with me.

Going into the studio without the answers

We gathered for a weekend.

There were no finished songs waiting on music stands. No carefully prepared arrangements. No grand production plan telling everyone exactly what should happen next.

Instead, we meditated. We created a ritual space. We became quiet.

And then came the slightly terrifying part.

I opened my mouth.

I had spent years learning how to use my voice, but this required something different. I wasn’t trying to perform well. I wasn’t even trying to make something beautiful.

I was trying to listen while I was singing.

A sound came.

Then another.

A melody began to form before I knew where it was going.

The musicians listened too. Someone responded to a phrase. Another sound entered. A rhythm appeared. Something I sang changed what someone else played, which changed what came out of me next.

We weren’t following a composition.

We were following each other.

And gradually, something began to exist that hadn’t existed before.

That experience changed the way I understood creativity.

Because nobody in that room could really say, “I made this.”

We made it together, certainly. But even that description didn’t feel completely accurate.

It felt more as though we had created the conditions for something to emerge.

And then came the computers

Of course, mystical inspiration is wonderful until you have several hours of recordings that need to be turned into an album.

Then a very different kind of creativity begins.

We listened. We edited.

We layered voices and instruments. We removed what didn’t belong. We balanced frequencies, cleaned recordings, and added textures. We made hundreds of tiny decisions.

Technology entered the process—not as the source of the music, but as another participant in shaping what the music could become.

And this is the part I find fascinating when I look back now.

This happened long before artificial intelligence entered my creative life.

Yet the question I was exploring then is almost exactly the question I am exploring today.

What happens when human imagination meets technology?

For a long time, we have tended to describe these as two different worlds.

The human world is intuitive, emotional, messy, embodied and unpredictable.

Technology is precise, fast, structured and increasingly powerful.

But my experience as an artist has taught me that the most interesting possibilities often appear where those worlds meet.

A tool can extend an idea.

It can reveal possibilities I hadn’t considered.

It can allow me to experiment faster, hear differently, see differently, or take an idea somewhere I could not have taken it alone.

But there is a condition. I still have to listen. I still have to choose.

I still have to know when something feels alive and when it merely looks impressive.

And perhaps most importantly, I have to remember what I am trying to create and why.

That was true when I sat in a recording studio shaping the voices of thirteen imaginary Grandmothers.

It was true years later when I began illustrating the world of Queen Sheba.

And it is true today when I sit in front of an artificial intelligence system and discover that, once again, I am creating with something whose possibilities I don’t fully understand.

The tools have changed dramatically. The human responsibility has not.
Which brings me to the question I keep returning to as we craft this strange new future together:

Am I allowing technology to replace my humanity—or am I using it to expand what my humanity is capable of creating?

I suspect the future of creativity may depend on our ability to know the difference.

(The Images of the faces I have made with digital collage were made before AI gave me another way to create the faces.)