These are two songs about darkness. Not only the visual darkness of nature: the envelope of night, the vast emptiness of space – but also the darkness which is a feeling within ourselves. The feeling of emotional reckoning when confronting the precipice of mortality. Death is an incomprehensible calculus which, if we walk through the world with open eyes, we are fully aware that we are moving toward at all times. When I look into this chasm of darkness, the feeling which fills me is a sort of vertigo, an attraction and terror that seems to run from the root of my being. There is a gravitational comfort to this darkness.

I was born, raised, and I live now on the coast of California, in a place which is often swathed thickly in Pacific fog, and where there are few artificial lights to drown out the stars of the vast night. These darknesses and obscurities of the natural world have always been a great comfort to me; I feel much safer deep in the oceanic fog, under the dark blanket of night, than I do exposed to the brutality and vibrancy of the sunlight and the wide open world. So these songs are a meditation on this complex of emotions: of vertigo, of deep comfort beyond earliest memory, of the roots of universal mystery, of the glinting fear of death like a beacon in the night, and of the thousand-aged fog, whereby the Pacific ocean melds into the air to encompass and reclaim us, pulling us back toward the deep darkness of our origin.

Death is a sacred giving back. Christianity and other religions which fantasize about an afterlife do a disservice to the integrity of death; they blaspheme death, desacralizing it by way of authoring a comforting illusion. I find no balm in the illusion. I find comfort in the sacred reality of death: it is a generous giving back of the body (which we never owned to begin with); it is a full engagement with the circle and an affirmation that the circle is good. All life is food, the source of more life. Every conscious moment we experience is a gift, not granted for eternity but only borrowed for a transitory breath, and thus precious.

This music is not just about death and impermanence, however. It is also about a complex of inexpressible emotions and swirling textures. Movement, color, light, shadow. The aesthetics of the natural world cast a transcendent mystique upon the consciousness of all who engage with it. Thus, being born into consciousness, we are in contract with the aesthetic principles of nature. Music, and all art, proceed from these principles, and are therefore a celebration of being alive. It is my hope that the listener may recognize some glimmer of emotion, something familiar moving in the sonic shadow shapes and textures here which are echoes of my own emotional response to the beauty of the natural world. These songs are indeed about darkness, but about a deep revelatory joy within that darkness: a relishing of safety and comfort and a feeling of wonder.

This album is dedicated with love to the memory of my recently departed uncle, Steve Sydlik, who always showed me love and support, and who wanted to understand why I was creating music about darkness, and was unafraid to ask me about it. He always supported my artistic endeavors, and while his presence will be sadly missed, his memory will be cherished.