Liner Notes

Welcome back — here’s how the story continues. If Trickster was the introduction to the characters, the songs on this album are their children, bearing their features but finding their own way. The flight of the Trickster moves across the threshold into the magic world, traverses sea and sky, visits ancient islands, is tested in the tempest, is abandoned, and returns with stories to tell. The titles and themes of the compositions are borrowed from writings about the Sea, the endless source of symbolism involving mystery, creation, and terrible power.

1) Rise and Shine

“And it came to pass at the end of forty days,
 that Noah opened the window of the ark which he had made:
 And he sent forth a raven, which went forth to and fro,
 until the waters were dried up from off the earth.”

– Genesis 8:6–7, KJV

A song for waking up. Rising tides and updrafts. The story of the dove that brings the olive branch to Noah is widely known. But what about this Raven, who was the first scout sent out from the Ark, never to return or be mentioned again? There’s a lost story here that we can imagine, the route of this messenger on its search for refuge. The ascending harmonies give us rising waters and Trickster’s flight to the opening in the firmament. 

2) Dog Star

“Then they came to a round hole in the sky and around the edge of the hole was short grass, glowing like fire. Raven said, ‘This is the star called the moon-dog.’ Some of the grass had been pulled up. Raven said he had taken some to start the first fire on earth. Then Raven said to Man, ‘Shut your eyes. I will take you to another country.’ Man climbed upon Raven’s back and they dropped down through the star hole. They floated a long, long time through the air, then they floated through something else. When they stopped Raven saw he was at the bottom of the sea.”

– Myths and Legends of Alaska, edited by Katharine Berry Judson

From sky to sea. Dog Star is the scorcher Sirius to the Greeks and Sopdet to the ancient Egyptians, bringing the flooding of the Nile. It is Sigi Tolo to The Dogon of Mali, home of their fish-god ancestors the Nommo. Trickster enters the realm of the unknown, or unknowable. Alien sounds pay a visit from the binary star. 

3) Anthemoessa

“And soon they saw a fair island, Anthemoessa, where the clear-voiced Sirens, daughters of Achelous, used to beguile with their sweet songs whoever cast anchor there, and then destroy him. . . . and suddenly to the heroes, too, they sent forth from their lips a lily-like voice. And they were already about to cast from the ship the hawsers to the shore, had not Thracian Orpheus, son of Oeagrus, stringing in his hands his Bistonian lyre, rung forth the hasty snatch of a rippling melody so that their ears might be filled with the sound of his twanging; and the lyre overcame the maidens’ voice. And the west wind and the sounding wave rushing astern bore the ship on; and the Sirens kept uttering their ceaseless song.”

– Apollonius Rhodius, Argonautica

Moving West, beyond the enchanted island. After the ship finds safe passage, we stay on the isle of the Sirens to hear their song once more. The harmonies are Piscean twin fishes, connected by a string of melody. 

4) Seven Sisters

“Again, number seven is closely connected with the occult significance of the Pleiades, those seven daughters of Atlas, the six present, the seventh hidden . . . The myth of Atlas is an allegory easily understood. Atlas is the old continents of Lemuria and Atlantis, combined and personified in one symbol. The poets attribute to Atlas, as to Proteus, a superior wisdom and an universal knowledge, and especially a thorough acquaintance with the depths of the ocean: because both continents bore races instructed by divine masters, and because both were transferred to the bottom of the seas, where they now slumber until their next reappearance above the waters.”

– Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine (Vol II, 618, 762)

At the site of the sunken island of Atlas. A song in two tempos, one for the city on the ocean floor, and one for the celestial dome that Atlas holds above, standing at the Western edge of the Earth. For the time being, his daughters are safe in their constellation. For Wayne Shorter. 

5) Monstropolous

“The monstropolous beast had left his bed. The two hundred miles a hour wind had loosed his chains. He seized hold of his dikes and ran forward until he met the quarters; uprooted them like grass and rushed on after his supposed-to-be conquerors, rolling the dikes, rolling the houses, rolling the people in the houses along with other timbers. The sea was walking the earth with a heavy heel.”

– Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

The tempest arrives, erasing the boundary between land and sea. Water creatures washed ashore, land creatures pulled into the depths. For New Orleans. 

6) The Castaway

“The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man’s insanity is heaven’s sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God.”

– Herman Melville, “The Castaway,” Moby Dick

Song of solitude. The isolated mind creates an imaginary world out of whatever materials are at hand. With enough time, a single clue may be viewed from every angle to reveal a way home. 

7) The Lighthouse

“Unfathomable mind, now beacon, now sea.”

– Samuel Beckett, Molloy

A song of return. The beacon shines and guides us to the shore. For John Coltrane.  

8) To Dream Again

“Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises,
Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices
That, if I then had waked after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again: and then, in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open and show riches
Ready to drop upon me that, when I waked,
I cried to dream again.”

– William Shakespeare, The Tempest

Postscript: A lullaby. In this dream logic, there is a parallel world hidden behind the clouds. It is nearly the same as ours — similar enough that if you stay there for a while you may forget which side is which.

About the Artwork

The cover recalls the image seen on Trickster. Now Raven has either been surrounded by a deluge, or has flown through the sky into the empyrean areas. The constellations are visible on the blue surface, a view that roughly corresponds to a night sky visible in Northern latitudes during the Winter months, when Orion makes an appearance. Trickster is carefully folded and sculpted, while the sea-sky is haphazardly crumpled and punctured. Both are ways of working with the form of the square. 

When the back cover is included, we see that Raven is facing some celestial machine, a kind of orrery off to the West. Look closely at the contraption to see that there is an eclipse at this moment. Some may recognize this theme from the famous Flammarion Engraving image shown here, showing a figure peeking behind the curtain of the firmament. 

A few questions: Did Trickster find a home on this barren island, or is it merely stopping to rest before heading further West? Did the sea rise, or did the sky fall? If the listener’s thoughts turn to humanity’s desperate search for refuge after destroying their own natural habitat, they wouldn’t be entirely wrong.

And what became of the fox from the Trickster cover? This is another story, for another album.

Credits

Produced by Miles Okazaki
Executive Producers: Seth Rosner and Yulun Wang
Recorded at The Samurai Hotel, Astoria, NY on June 13–14, 2019,
by Mike Marciano and Max Ross, and June 29, 2019, by Max Ross.
Mixed by Anthony Tidd at TidbiT Sonos, Philadelphia, PA.
Mastered by Max Ross at Systems Two Studios, North Bellmore, NY.
Folding and drawing by Miles Okazaki
Package Design by Miles Okazaki
Raven design by Quentin Trollip
Band photo by Dimitri Louis