THIS IS FOR YOU:

7 psychedelic lullabies for Naema.
by
the HAbiTE TRIO

These tracks were all made for her while she was on her way.

This album is what we sound like live.
We are progenitors of consensual improvisation undergirded by trust.
LULLABY (This Is For You 7) is how we started this TRIO, and it is how we end this bit of time travel with you. Thank you for flying with us on HAbiTE Spacelines aka Spaceways. With an improvised live performance on June 22, 2022 at the closing party for Lara and my joint art exhibition at the former Ed. Varie gallery space on East 7th Street and Avenue B, the HAbiTE TRIO coalesced a suspicion into a new soothing vibe. LULLABY was born as the last number of the gig and this moment set the stage for all subsequent songs and shows by the TRIO. We have played at Rockwood and 360 Record Shop since and we are ready to share how things fall into place and apart with you and everybody else.
This was for Naema before she was here. Our world is for Naema now that she has arrived. Much love, Rhasaan Oyasaba Manning.

Habité in French comes from the verb habiter which means to live in.
The adjective habité means to be inhabited by a person, a feeling, a thought or a passion.

Years float into the past..

On two rafts of lumber and rods and nuts and washers and tatami and foam and canvas once dreamt of as leather never leather though, and fine woven cotton to the skin atop upside-down cement fence post bases on hardwood floors. The rafts are moored on either side by half-raft tables topped with sheets of found glass atop scrap wood pylons wrapped in dock rope. A bamboo table, low and wide, anchors the room.

The tides shift. We row in concert.
Nautical is the air in which we sit,
we eat, we drink, we live,
we work.

The Covid-19 confinement was a pause in all our lives and for us it led to creating a new space for new experimentation.
At the outset, we would retreat to our respective studios
to work separately, as per usual.
As the quarantine wore on, it felt right to take further advantage of our home space, and for the first time in our 7 years of cohabitation, our
living room became our place to create side by side. We both employ the human body, portraits, allusions of movement, metamorphosis, and transformation in our work. Before the lockdown our habits of style, shape and line coexisted primarily in opposition. Within the time warp of the lockdown, we began to see our artworks tacitly converge. The more we create in the same space, the more our choices begin to harmonize in an unintentional communication.

All this is a piece of the preamble to the birth of our daughter Naema!!!