Home

It’s called Home, and for a myriad of reasons… from my attempts to examine and re-examine what ‘home’ means, living 7,000 miles from my own, in a place that goes out of its way to remind you every time you leave the house that where you are is not your home… to really what ‘home’ means philosophically I guess, how much of it derives its meaning intrinsically, how much of it is manufactured, and really what it means to ‘be home’… to the fact that my return to Echospace is really a return home for so many reasons I could never even attempt to outline here.
This issue of what home means, and what it means to be home, is one I’ve grappled with for years upon years of self-imposed exile in China, isolated from everyone and everything that I would associate with what at least would best encroach on a standard definition of ‘home’… it’s hard to describe until you experience it yourself, like most things, I guess.
The album is a bit hard to describe… while it obviously has many qualities that my work always contains, there’s just something about it that is nothing like anything else I’ve made… I really don’t know how to describe it… from the way it sounds, to the way it feels, there is just something about it that’s unlike anything else I’ve made. It’s by far my most hypnotic work, and really possibly my most powerful, but in a quieter way than I think most would expect when I use a word like that, as I’m generally known for being pretty overboard.
It’s pretty massive… a double CD, all of my own work, with one CD containing (some) beats, and one beatless, but it’s dramatically different from White Clouds Drift On and On, much darker, much more hypnotic, and more somber in some ways, while in some ways going to new heights of emotion that even White Clouds couldn’t reach, or really anything I’ve made before.
I really am honestly perplexed with this fascination in recent years with seeing what artists look like. Who cares?
As with anything, I don’t really know how or why it came out the way it did, I just listened to my heart and went with what it said… but (just like White Clouds) it was made from beginning to end completely from scratch purely for Echospace, and more importantly, was the first time I sat down to try to face this issue of ‘home’ head-on… a lot of my music touches on it, as it’s such a massive part of my daily life, but this is the only time I’ve ever really tried to face it head-on, in all its beautiful, horrible, exhilarating, terrifying glory. Though it couldn’t really be much more different from my last Echospace album, it shares a similarity, in that it could have only been made for Echospace. No one else in the world could bring out what it brought out in me. As always, I just hope someone can feel what I feel.