Sedna

It’s hard to believe my first album as The Lifted Index will be turning two in a couple of months. I will always remember making this ‘Sedna’ because it was the most freeing experience I have ever had as a musician. Prior to its recording I had been working on one single album for years, struggling to find a sound and aesthetic that always felt frustratingly beyond my reach.

The recording sessions that eventually became Sedna were initially conceived as a mental break for myself from that other record. I referred to Sedna as my “side quest” album. I turned my previous way of working upside down. No drums. Essentially no bass. Just me and a few pieces of inspirational gear, and the space carved out to create. Something about that casual approach made the whole thing feel frictionless.

Just prior to recording, my family and I took a short camping trip. Out in the woods I began to ruminate on this single word: unseen. I thought about how so little of what we experience in our lives are visible to us. So much is implied, gestured at, or presumed. Even more still passes completely beneath our perception. We are finite creatures in an infinite world.

Something about those thoughts felt compelling to me; compelling enough to explore through music. So that is what I did. In an effort to mark my intentions in some way, I added vocals to two of the tracks. Embedded in “To Look Up at the Cold Sky” is the number 90377, the designation assigned to the titular trans-Neptunian planetoid. “Light of the Unseen Sun” includes phrases taken from the eleventh chapter of the book of Hebrews, where the author muses on the nature of faith and its relationship to things unseen.

The words are primarily there to serve as texture, but they are always intentional. I did not, however, intend for them to become such an integral part of the fabric of whatever The Lifted Index became. But I liked having this human stamp on my music, so they remain a crucial element of my sound.

Sedna will always hold a special place in my heart. It is the album that gave me back my musical voice; something I had lost for a long time without even realizing it. Or maybe it had been there all along, only hidden. Unseen.