The ritual and container for my next album, Rites of Nature, has just opened.

I am at the very beginning. The songs have not arrived yet. I have learned over the years that I cannot rush this part. I open the container, begin listening, and wait for the songs to show me who they are.

The prayer of this album is for a widening population of the human species to remember ways of listening with the land and the more than human world. To listen through the body. To loosen, for a moment, the constant sense making of the mind. To wonder what becomes perceptible when we listen beyond our current understanding of listening.

Beloved wild and alive world, what are your rites? What do you want my species to know at this time? How can we be in better relationship and reciprocity with you? Teach me to listen.

I know already that this record is circling death, decomposition, aging, pleasure, surrender, grief, symbiosis, birth, and the staggering beauty of being an animal body inside a living world. We die. We compost. We age. Bodies change. Life eats life and becomes life again. Somewhere inside all of this is also mischief, appetite, sensuality, play, and joy. Pleasure because death exists.

I am curious about the intelligences and languages of Whale. Glacier. Salmon. Forest. Rock. Goose. Ocean. Mycelium. About migration and magnetism, ancestral passage, decomposition and regeneration, the rhythms by which bodies and ecosystems know when to move, rest, release, transform, and begin again. I am interested in songs that emerge through relationship with these beings and processes, with field recordings and sounds from the living world becoming participants in the music itself.

There will be layered voices. There will be rhythm and trance. There will be choirs recorded. Exactly how the choirs enter is something I am allowing the songs themselves to reveal.

And although the album is at the center, Rites of Nature is multidisciplinary because the work wants bodies, images, masks, movement, ritual theatre, and visual storytelling alongside sound. It is also rooted within a larger movement toward the Rights of Nature, multispecies flourishing, and the remembering of humans as participants within a living world. There is much more here that I am not ready to reveal yet.

For now, consider this a small opening of the door.