"Blackness is a very important part of our thing," Blood tells me later over several Buffalo Trace whiskies at a Seattle cocktail bar. "It’s a detail, but it’s an important detail. It’s our perception of reality. It affects the art that we make and how we view things in the world and how people listen to us. Black music is for everybody—but people still feel weirdly threatened." That threat is of engaging eye-to-eye with a group of people who have been systematically diminished, who are now moving upward and forward, who don't care whether or not you get it.

That's the sense I get meeting with Alley-Barnes and Butler in the Frye's café patio a few days before “Expanding the Now”. Talking to them about what the art means—foolish. Meaning happens everywhere, on a moment-to-moment basis.

"The art is actually the leavings, man," Alley-Barnes says. "This is what Western society has failed to understand in all the years that you guys—I'm comfortable saying 'you guys'—have been studying these things."

You guys. That's me, the nosy journalist? The concerned white guy? The only person here not part of Black Constellation? Yes, yes, and yes.

"You get really interested in the mark that's left but pay no attention to the motion it took to make it, or what the training was, or why that mark has that curve, or any of that, and that's backwards,” he continues. “So now you've got all these industries focused on the ephemera or the leavings of sacred things. And part of the difficulty for a lot of people is that you guys don't start at a seed or any level of root growth. You're talking about the skin of the peach that fell and hit you on the head having never looked up or down."

The suggestions here are deep: Intellect does more harm than good. Media is a series of clueless, pointless arguments for the sake of argument. Art and music have been commodified and drained of the vitality required to create them, fire turned to ash and then sold to the lazy and gullible who don't know themselves enough to question the whole equation.

Alley-Barnes has long been Black Constellation's primary scribe; he penned the group's earliest bios, which read more like sci-fi mythology than press materials. Where the rest of the collective swaddles social critique in lyricism or metaphor, he's bold and querulous. He visibly winces at my questions—he's basically just humoring me—but the intellectual connection between him and Butler is seamless.

"Language is a very superficial way to communicate," Butler says, "and people feel like because you can read and talk that you're somehow superior than other people who communicate in different ways. It's not that it don't matter, but it just don't really matter to us like that."

Me, struggling: "So the art is the thing?"

"Not just the art," Butler says. "Inhaling and exhaling is the thing.”

He continues: “This is not to be exclusive or elite or separate, but to let you people understand that this notion of the individual being of ultimate importance is lame and weak and, most of all, corny. There's feast and then there's famine. Those that have been hungry, not allowed to participate in the feast—that's not going to continue. This blind, comment-less avarice and greed for nothing, selling out of the culture for no reason without really gaining anything but personal stuff—that's over."