The metallic resonance creates a fine set of overtones; I think this is lovely music.

-Vital Weekly, issue 1367

‘Underground Networks’ sounds like a bright orange sun rising on a day already alive with heat shimmering on the horizon. Elsewhere, the staccato notes of ‘surface tension’ seem to set the song apart from the traditional Indian ragas I’ve heard – a lovely surprise.

-Tracy Schoenle, former editor of Cricket Magazine

In ‘re-cycling’ I distilled a true story, into its component parts, and put it back together as the narrative of this album's music. Each track represents one of five elements: a fungus, a bacteria, rocks, water, a tree. These elements come together to create a forest of sound approaches created through sitar and tabla.

The album's title – ‘re-cycling’ – works on several levels. It's a reference to the cycles of life and death, familiar cycles (the water cycle, the rock cycle) and unfamiliar ones: like the beat-cycles of the tabla - the intricate patterns of the 'theka' that keep repeating - both audibly and inaudibly. Furthermore, it's a reference to improvisation in sitar music, risking the possible banality of repeating yourself while always striving to re-order and re-compose something transcendent in each musical moment.

re-cycling: "My friend Nate led me deep into Conkle's hollow. We climbed up above on the bluff, stepped off the trail for a view. I knelt down at the edge of this small cliff and noticed a tiny tree growing, just a couple finger joints high. I looked closer and noticed these tiny pebbles, river-smoothed pebbles, resting in place - yet out of place - under this tiny tree. Puzzled, we got back on the trail. As it meandered up and down above the bluff, like a calm ocean wave, I noticed more little groups of round pebbles - so out of place - yet clearly arranged by nature, not an installation artist. At the end of our journey, an informative sign indicated the source of the pebbles: an ancient, thin yet unique layer of rock called the Berne conglomerate. But what happened to the sandstone gluing those pebbles together? Somehow, that tiny tree, in concert with bacteria and fungi, digested that sandstone and left those pebbles like apple cores after snacktime. Then I realized: we come from rocks. The distinction between animate and inanimate objects misleads us. We are all one."

This album took much longer to conceive, compile, edit, arrange, and mix than any of my previous albums. My priorities and perspectives changed over the course of this project.

I first took inspiration from a concert where I heard an amazing, playful, energetic, engaging rendition of the South Asian Classical raga, Todi. I took note of the movements of the notes and the new possibilities revealed in the music and wanted to work with Raag Todi. After a few years, I found myself in several months of practice for this raga, coinciding with my first meeting with tabla player Pavan Kanekal. We hit it off right away, with a musical rapport that felt sometimes like the simultaneous improvisations of Cream that I enjoyed so much in high school. We decided to make an album.

In Summer 2018 we recorded for a few hours, two days in a row in Seattle. I think neither of us felt satisfied, and unfortunately I didn't mix any of that material right away. A month later, we decided to do another session at my home in Salem, OR. We thought we'd found some satisfactory recordings and I set about recording many more solo versions of Raag Todi, one of which I hoped would make it onto the album.

As we finished recording together, our implicit audience was one of South Asian Classical music enthusiasts, perhaps even our respective gurus. This really influenced our choices as to which recordings to use, looking for recordings with no mistakes, perfect timing. So I tried to put things together based on this conservative, make-no-mistakes policy. I ended up with an album that didn't feel innovative or inspiring and lacked the fire and energy and depth that I had experienced when I heard Sandhya Kathavate perform Todi back in Summer of 2015.

So the project stalled, I came up with a new album, finished it, and started raising my child in the midst of a global pandemic. A little over a year into the pandemic, I decided I needed to revisit all my recordings with Pavan, and those made just before and just after our work together.

Coming back to the album with a multi-year gap changed my perspective. I found soulful recordings I had overlooked and was inspired to arrange, mix, and experiment akin to my early punk rocker days.

I present, ‘re-cycling,’ a journey into improvisation and re-contextualization as inspired by Raag Todi and a small tree growing from a pile of rocks. I hope you enjoy.