An album preoccupied with spiritual themes, with transfiguration, the good life, with the soil, with the afterlife. The After is a meditation on timelessness and ethereality and their relation to the vanishing moment we call life.
The opening track, “Extremophile” pictorializes, through tableaus of near-waltzes, the passage of life lived in a connected fashion, in serenity and wisdom.
“Mirrored Moss” represents the fungal texture of the planet, how its totality resides as a meeting ground between animate and inanimate, which the nonvascular plants and the eukaryotic forms serve as the “middle ground” between those two polarities.
“Silent Veil” is the surreal dream state of communication with spirits already on the other side.
“The Harvest” is the dramatization of an agrarian myth, with giant cadences representing the earth delivering its grains in an all-encompassing feast.
The last four tracks represent a transfiguration from matter into the spectral stuff of the afterlife: “Preparation” is the laying of the body down, “Gift to the Fire” is the ritual burning of the body, “Tomorrow’s Halls” is the journey upward and “The After” is the floating, transcendent state within the outer plain.
“The Harvest” and “Mirrored Moss” feature the wonderful Paul Brantley on cello. “Silent Veil” features Meena Ysanne on vocals.
Album cover design by Nathan Youngblood.