I never imagined myself believing in ghosts. My last record, Binary Ghosts, was about ghosts of the digital yet tangible kind; remnants from our lives that we leave behind on the internet. After a fairly culty religious upbringing, I shunned most ideas of the supernatural.

In 2019, my wife and I bought a small Lutheran church in upstate New York that was built in 1856. It’s now a house, but retains the spirit of its previous life… and I mean that figuratively and literally.

After a few months with it, it became clear that the place had… a vibe. Friends reported mysterious strumming of left out guitars in the night, pitter patters, and all sorts of strange noises.

Myself, I always felt a strange indescribable presence there. It motivated me to treat it with respect and reverence. Yes, we were new owners turning it from a church into a vacation house, but we were also caretakers of this building that had outlasted generations.

On March 11th of 2020, our daughter Cecilia was born in New York City. That was also the day that Covid-19 was declared a pandemic, SXSW and the NBA were cancelled, and San Francisco went into lockdown. With a newborn in the epicenter of the largest pandemic of the last century, we fled upstate to the church and found refuge in its walls.

It was a tumultuous time; navigating not only being new parents, but also an unprecedented health crisis, inability to access familial support, and juxtaposing comfort and the insanity of living in essentially a giant reverberant room for the first months of our daughter’s life.

The church was both a blessing and a prison. Every thought of thankfulness was second guessed by a feeling of entrapment and loneliness. Every argument was tempered by gratitude to have a safe harbor for our new family.

Eventually, we uncovered our path forward and moved to Austin, TX in July of 2020 to establish a new life. In May of 2021, we returned to the church for a month to enjoy spring in New York, and pay a visit to the place that had played such an important role in our lives.

For a while, I knew the placed needed some sort of instrumental centerpiece. As soon as we arrived, I purchased a reasonably priced Chickering baby grand from the 70’s just outside of New Paltz. After I got it home, I taught myself to tune pianos via YouTube videos. Got it sounding quite beautiful, especially in the unique space. I could tell the spirits were pleased.

In the month that followed, I recorded “Divinations of the Taghkanic” on that piano in that space. The sounds on the record are the sounds of redemption, spring, renewal, and realignment. We and the spirits communed to turn what was most recently an immensely difficult place for our family, into a place of inspiration and beauty once again.