Ursula K. Leguin’s translation of the Tao Te Ching includes some of her commentary along the way. “We are waves. It is the sea,” she wrote, It being capital-I It, the Way. (This commentary is on a verse that includes the line “To know harmony/ is to know what’s eternal.” Hmm.) This album, these songs, do not represent some sort of reduction of Taoist principles, but the process is – always – an attempt to lose the self in it (It?). The wave is clearly less than the sea, and yet the wave is the sea. These songs, the end result of letting what happens happen, are some solid joints, and I hope the joy of the process shines through here.

These were recorded in 2018 and 2019, and the album was finished as I prepared to move with my family, feeling very much tossed by the sea, and making every attempt to embrace the change and consider how the sea’s waves are all essentially interconnected through the ocean, something vastly larger than any individual wave and that we know very little of.

I’ll also say that “we are waves” is a reference not only to Ursula K. Leguin’s commentary, but also to a fundamental physical truth about what we are. Some of that thinking pops up in “electrical output,” one of two tracks featuring vocal samples.

Well, this is all high-minded and I mean it as well as plenty more where words fail. Thirteen jams, held together as an all-but-completely instrumental album that I hope you’ll enjoy.