I'm especially proud of this one. it's been by far the most involved process since starting to record & share my sounds at the start of last year. everything was recorded aloud through a bass amplifier in the late afternoons/evenings of 4 nonconsecutive days in the june heatwave, at the end of a 2 month period of intensive daily prayer & journalling

on one of the between-days I woke up with an almost magnetic feeling pulling me towards a small muddy river just outside of town. so there, by the tadpole-rich riverbed, I prayed for an hour or so to Holy Sophia for help and guidance, for answers to questions I'd been asking all my life and questions the answers to which I had always been too afraid of to sincerely & humbly ask for, until then. I sobbed for about twenty minutes the moment I got home, feeling answers that came one by one lodged like gems in the tender flesh of my heart, and a well of healing & forgiveness where once had been a pit of fear & shame. "return to the water" is one of the smaller of these gems, and the decision to title the track this way came that afternoon

"return to the water" is not necessarily an instruction to return to a physical body of water, but the cosmological primordial water that the Spirit rested over before the creation of the Heavens & the Earth (in the Genesis version of the cosmos' beginnings), a water that can be accessed both exoterically through the living water of Creation and esoterically through the Spirit in prayer or meditation. it is a surrender of will, of selfhood, of all the trappings of culture, identity, and circumstance, to be temporarily removed from the fantasy world we have collectively & individually built up around ourselves and returned to the inconceivable ambiguity of reality, bringing a little back with us each time in the hope that someday we might live free of blake's "mind forg'd manacles". you are a saint, nothing more, and everything less

god bless

hope you enjoy