The working title for this album was HyperMeditative, and I liked the idea of starting the record with an ambient palette cleanser. This one actually began as a transition piece Don Ravo and I worked on for my first album. I layered a mist of chanting vocals over his gauzy synths, plus some low oms in the mix to set the intention for the project. My first album also opens with an ambient song, "North Sea," and I liked the idea of starting my second album the same way.

Gear shift into hyperspeed. If CELESTIAL INTERLUDE represents the meditative elements of the record, then WE ARE FREE is definitely the hyper. It kicks off the rave and club energy of the album.

The track is a reimagining of "Love Stitch," a Nujabes-esque collaboration between me and Tokyo-based artist MNDSET. The lyrics were inspired by our moms, who are both quilters, and how they put love into every stitch. The Magus Project reworked it into a whole new universe. The Shepard tone intro feels like acceleration, and the huge bass drops feel like you're cresting a roller coaster. It was originally released by my close friends Hiro and MNDSET at B.E.S.T. Records. Big shout out to the homies.

I started this one walking through a late-night mist towards the Han River in Seoul. It was one of those melodies that just comes to you. I don't really know where the Korean lyrics came from, but I decided to go with them. 나만의 길로 가는 걸 means roughly "walking a road that's mine alone." I've lived in Seoul for almost 20 years, but sometimes it can still feel lonely and far from home, even though in many ways Seoul is my home now.

There's a little conversation within the song. The CYRRCA sections carry a questioning solitude, and jerd's voice arrives like a calming, celestial response. She wrote her lyrics and melodies on the spot in the studio with me and producer Chris Denny. It was jerd who really brought this song to life. BYUL CHEORUM (별처럼) means "like a star," which is kind of how her voice feels to me.

I've always loved Rumi’s poetry. I made a pilgrimage to his shrine in Konya, Turkey, during my traveling days. His teachings inspired the Whirling Dervishes, the Sufis who dance and spin as a kind of moving prayer. Rumi is the original Mystic Raver, and this song comes from that.

The percussion has a circular, trance-like groove, with a string sample that sounds like some mysterious traditional instrument. It's called MYSTIC RAVER, but it doesn't sound like rave music in the modern electronic sense, and I like that. Rave culture shaped me a lot when I was younger, from London to Bulgaria and beyond.

GGUM, CHIGEUM (꿈, 지금) means "dreaming now." It's kinda like the manifesto of this album, a microcosm of the CYRRCA 2.0 world.

The song came from feeling overwhelmed by the city, the phone and all the noise of a world that never logs off. Music is a space of no thought, no time, in the midst of life's chaos. KHYO's thundering 808s anchor the concept and really drew the song out of me.

There aren't a lot of production elements: just the drums and the main drone-like sound. The whole beat is felt in your body and your head. It's a really physical track. The verses are about the hyper-intensity of contemporary society and algorithmic chaos, and the hook is a club-meditation: 꿈을 마셔, 뱉어, 이 비트 들어봐 / 춤추자 지금, 꿈을 꿈꾸는 지금 (inhale a dream, exhale, hear this beat / let's dance now, now as we dream).

In my bands I often find myself writing love songs, but I hadn't written one yet in the CYRRCA project, and this was the first track that came out that way. It’s an innocent, sweet love song about the jitters of really liking someone: texting back and forth, wondering when or if they'll reply.

The melody came out easily one day at B.A. Wheeler's studio. We wrote it together in real time, him putting the beat together while I sang over it, and I knew SUMIN was perfect for it. Then we started her part of the process at her home studio. I'd always imagined floating through clouds, so she pulled up a flight-through-the-clouds visualizer on her desktop. She also brought a whole different groove and drums to the production.

I originally wrote a second verse for the song, but I thought the track would be better with a feature. I shared that verse with SUMIN anyway, and it was cool that she kept a couple of lines from it as a nod to the original demo.

Iced Americanos are a Korean national obsession. There's even a common saying about them: 얼어 죽어도 아이스 아메리카노, "even if I freeze to death, I drink iced Americano."

Being American, I flipped it: 죽었다 깨도 난 아메리카노, "even if I die and come back to life, I'm Americano." Americano also means "American" in Spanish, which is how the Spanish got in, and I had fun bringing in snippets of every language I know, even if just a little.

It started as just my rap hook and verse, and junglë and I agreed it needed a melody, like a jingle for iced Americano. She came back right away with one, plus Japanese lyrics that basically say: "in winter or summer, give it to me iced please, and cool down this irritating world." Lil Cherry was the natural feature: she flows in English and Korean, and I'd heard her use a little Spanish on tracks before too. Her verse is so fire, I love it so much I memorized it and can rap it word for word myself.

A couple years ago there was a TikTok challenge called #12345678 where you count from one to eight in rhythm, dropping a number each round and then building back up. I thought it was simple and silly, so I tried doing it in Korean as a way of testing my skill in the language. It was actually more challenging in Korean than I expected. At the time I was also listening to a minimal, modular techno track that Coquinati had sent me. It had the right BPM and vibe to bring out the rhythm of the flow.

I have so much love for Seoul, but it’s also crazy competitive, with everyone constantly comparing and trying to move up. This track speaks to that. In the chorus I use the word "계산적" (calculating), and I liked how the idea of calculating connected back to the counting motif. Everyone's calculating. Everyone's counting. But the chorus just keeps saying: 멈추지 마 (don't stop). For the title I shortened it to just 지 마 (JII MA), the part of the phrase that means "don't."

B.A. Wheeler and I built the track out further, jacked it up, and put some big wheels on it. I really love the outro we created with delay throws and rhythmic vocal chops. It's probably my favorite outro on the record.

Namsan is a mountain park in the center of Seoul that borders my neighborhood, Itaewon. It's my nature retreat and the place I run and train.

I got a jolt of energy when my homie Don Ravo hit me with the initial beat, so I laced up and went out for a loop around Namsan. Listening to the Brazilian-funk beat, all these ideas for the rhymescape started flooding in while I ran.

For this track I liked the idea of taking a familiar K-pop formula and flipping it. You often hear Korean verses with an English hook, so I reversed it: English verses, Korean hook. Once I had the structure locked, I went to JINBO the Superfreak's studio and we worked on the synth lines that became a key feature in the track. Then B.A. Wheeler and I really dug into the rhythms and vocal treatments, which came out vivid and raw.

This track also became the beginning of the visual world for this era. I made the music video with director EEHOSOO, and one of the meditation scenes we shot for it later ended up in a music video he directed for aespa. A little connection I still think is pretty cool, cuz I started this track by flipping a K-pop formula.

I almost left this track off the record. It came early on, when a lot of what I wrote was stream of consciousness. But it carries so much of what I write about and what inspires me, so it stayed.

"Muhan" (무한) means "infinite" in Korean, so the title is really just "infinite infinite." It kinda sums up the philosophy behind World Tribe, my label. It gets pretty cosmic, but it's still built for the dance floor.

It keeps some odes to nature flowing on the album: mist, moss, roots, rivers, waterfall suds, the waterbugs and the salty ocean breeze, until the line between us and nature disappears. "Sister, we are all of these / Brother, we are all of these."

Before I started making music, I wanted to be a writer and I spent a couple of years writing while backpacking around the world on a personal quest. This song holds a little of that era.

It started as a poem about the hazy quality of memory and this dreamlike trip in Thailand from years ago. I've recorded vocals for it a few times over the years, some lower quality and some higher. I interspersed little snippets of those takes throughout, reversing or modulating them to give the poem a half-remembered vibe.

Don Ravo’s production echoes the hopeful melancholy of the poem, and the UK garage drums come in and give it momentum underneath. Something about that combination brought me back to the time and feeling I was writing about. I finished the first demo on Valentine's Day, and that's where the VL comes from.

I was chilling by the pool at the COMO Metropolitan, one of my favorite hotels, when Don Ravo sent me this UK jump-up remix. The breaks sound like alarms going off. It goes so hard. Back in Seoul I met with KHYO to work on the arrangement of the hooks. For the MV, director Jonah Whipp and I went back to one of the tunnels where we shot the original GGUM, CHIGEUM, so even the visual is a kind of remix.

I grew up in Michigan and went to clubs in the Detroit area in the early 2000s. People used to go crazy when ghettotech anthems by DJ Assault and DJ Godfather came on. The DJs would play them alongside hip-hop and Daft Punk, so I just assumed it was everywhere, one of the current sounds of club music. It wasn't till much later that I realized these were local legends.

So in 2023, when I saw bojvck playing his original ghettotech tracks at Cakeshop in Seoul, I was super inspired. It turned out to be his first set at Cakeshop. We talked after the show and shortly after we started working on DDA RA HAE.

DDA RA HAE (따라해) means "repeat" in Korean. It's a lyric pulled from 144, and it has kind of a cheeky, silly vibe. It's used a lot in schools, as in "repeat after me." But it's also a comment on trend chasing, where people just follow whatever is popping in the moment.

I love how abstract bojvck took the track. We didn't go to any fancy studios. We just worked on the arrangement together at my kitchen table. We shot the music video in the mountains of Gapyeong on a MiniDV camcorder.

I really didn't know where h4rdy would go with this one, and I was kinda shocked, because he's known for his UK bass sound. He brought this club, dancehall edge to it, which felt like a totally new side to his work and made it even more special. To me the original ICED AMERICANO FOREVER always had a dancehall/reggaeton side to it, even though it wasn't explicit in the sound. I love how h4rdy’s approach brings this to the forefront.

He even chopped the first two bars off my flow, but it works so well. I went to his studio to finesse a couple of little mixing details together, and it was super cool to see his process.

junglë and I shot the MV across London and Iceland. It stretched the visual world of CYRRCA 2.0 from the beaches of Ishigaki, where the album photography was shot, to the Icelandic glaciers.

The glitchy, rhythmic vocal chops in the outro of the original CHU NOW made me want to take the remix in a hyperpop direction. Hoonnie’s a young producer shaping the sound in Seoul right now, and I actually met him through this track. I envisioned something that could carry bittersweet, kind of emo moods and also sweetness while banging in the club. I felt the CHU NOW world would expand well into those elements.

Hoonnie made the first version of the remix in an afternoon, and the moment I heard it I was in love. To be honest, I would have been happy to just release demo V1, but he kept tinkering and made it even better. It doesn't feel like a remix to me, more like this version of the track was always in there: just CHU NOW in Hoonnie’s galaxy. It's sticky, glitchy, club ready, so cool.

I've been a fan of Yeong Die’s work for a while. She’s one of the most prolific and creative producers in Seoul. I didn't ask her to remix this particular track. Instead I just told her to choose whatever she felt like doing, and do whatever she felt with it. I was kind of surprised she chose JII MA, but also secretly stoked, because I always felt the track had many worlds it could expand into.

With her IDM approach and musical background, she brought out the rhythm of the JII MA verses and the counting in such an intuitive way. She also added some dreamy jazz chords at the end that totally flip the intense vibe of the track into a kind of relieving calm. After a whole song of 멈추지 마 (don't stop), it finally lets you breathe.

Producer/DJ L-like and I both live in Itaewon, so I used the neighborhood as a starting point for some tongue-in-cheek storytelling. There's a typical Itaewon person and style, and I had fun playing with that character: all-black outfits, acting aloof, Saturday night near the station, trash smell and all, heading to the club seeming too cool to need anything, but deep down looking for love. It's also a tribute to a neighborhood and community I love.

L-like and I were connected through Neo Chimera, a compilation series of Seoul-based artists in the alternative electronic scene, and we originally made this song for it. She came up with the title and the general concept for her instrumental, and I'm glad we kept it. We worked on my vocals at her studio, and that's where I wrote the melody. She was really encouraging of my Korean lyrics, which made me want to write even more in Korean.

Releasing my first CYRRCA album felt like climbing Everest or K2. It was inspired by years of travel and so vast in scope. Every song is tied to a specific place and there were 13 music videos, 13 exhibitions on the 13 full moons of 2020, and an art book. Bringing the project to full release almost killed me.

ZEUS has the hook "I have descended from the mountain," and that's how I felt when I started this second album: I'd come down, and I was ready for chapter two, with a new experience and a new view.

The edit is called Carbonara as a nod to Coquinati, the Italian producer who made it. When he lived in Seoul, he invited me to his house for homemade carbonara, authentic Italian style. He cooked it for me and Døn Von, the producer of the original ZEUS, so it was only fitting to give the edit this name.