"Dread Sea is a confluence of two streams of electroacoustic music that started to emerge in the fall of 2020 and continued through the spring of 2021. The pieces started as improvisations on an mbira and a tiny accordion, both going through complex systems of electronic treatments. These heavily transformed instruments resisted "playing" in the traditional sense, but contributed their own layers of sonic material: feedback, transpositions, distortions, intentional or accidental patterning. All of the material was played live, improvised in real time, and much of it was recorded on a mono cassette machine through its internal mic, placed a few feet away from my amplifier.

The long form emerged gradually, through unexpected linkages discovered through editing, layering and collage. As I listened back to these multi-layered pieces, I kept thinking about water, especially about traveling on water, like a long day trip on the Amazon River I found myself on in 2006, during which I encountered a heavily drugged juvenile sloth who tried to attack me. It traced a long, slow arc in the air with its claw.

A story started to emerge along with the music, a journey from the place in Amazonas where the water of the Rio Negro meets the Rio Branco, to the village in the reeds where I met the sloth, to a frozen lake in Northern Maine some time in the distant past and back. The music doesn't follow that story so much as it mirrors the process of time and geography flowing together, in waves of rhythm, tone and noise, all interacting and blurring into each other, like bodies of water.""-Ted Reichman