Music and visual art can be a powerful medium to express an awareness on an innately energetic level. In the case of The Outlaw Ocean Music Project, it can give a comprehensive emotional depiction of what happens on the seas, which I personally knew very little about until reading Ian’s book. For me, there were five main ideas I centered each of my tracks around, creating an album that starts with promise and possibilities and ends shrouded in shadow.

My first song was inspired by the prose characterizing the ocean as a neutral and vast entity —  capable of good and evil, of providing both a prison and an escape. The second mirrored the feeling of stepping on a vessel for the first time at the very onset of a voyage. There’s a sense of anxiety, but overall a feeling of excitement about the potential of new beginnings. But, as the journey progresses, monotony and repetitiveness sets in, which is captured in the third track. I envisioned long days at sea spent daydreaming, where the mind begins to create its own narrative and a new reality.

My fourth song was inspired by the high-adrenaline and gratifying moment Sea Shepherd spots an illegal fishing ship and a chase ensues. The final piece was inspired by weather — imagining some of the fogs Ian might have seen, dense and seemingly otherworldly. There’s a feeling of anxiety that accompanies it, in which the mind delves deeper and deeper into the dark.

Kodomo