Inching Back from the Edge on “The Milky Sea”

A week ago, I snorted 300 mg of Wellbutrin with a rolled-up dollar bill. My body had gone countless weeks without absorbing my anti-depressant before I realized the undigested pill was not a stray kernel of corn in the toilet. I’d felt noticeably unmoored but attributed the wave of depression to the bitter cold in New York and the Trump administration’s barrage of inhumane and illegal executive orders. I was dissociating all the time: in the immediate aftermath of David Lynch’s death, I rewatched the entirety of Twin Peaks and The Return (48 episodes plus Fire Walk With Me in just two weeks). I covered the windows of my sunny living room with blankets while staring at the screen during the day, and got lost in Twin Peaks subreddit theories while lying in bed at night. Turns out it was a chemical malfunction—my body not doing my brain any favors.

The Wellbutrin tasted like shit in the back of my throat, but I almost immediately felt like a human being again. (I did this for a few days, until I could get a prescription for smaller pills.) It’s a strange feeling, regaining equilibrium on extended-release anti-depressants and sensing the medication as it hits. Your receptors are suddenly more open to the universe. The sunlight I was blocking felt almost magical as it made its way across the room, collecting in colored patches through stained glass. Music sounded incredible, but I also felt highly sensitive to meditative and minimalist works; the beauty of the playing alone made warm tears stream down my cheeks. Tears that were neither sad nor happy, but those of processing and trying to move forward without shame. 

This is where veteran ambient artist Jefre Cantu-Ledesma’s music came in handy. His new 20-minute work, which opens his forthcoming album Gift Songs, is called “The Milky Sea,” and since its release last week I’ve already cried to it three times (that’s an hour of crying, folks). The gently ascending track encourages that kind of cracked-wide-open contemplation. Cantu-Ledesma has been making solo records for 15 years—I became a fan thanks to 2015’s A Year With 13 Moons, which is on the dreamier end of an oeuvre that samples both birdsong and cryptic mechanical noise. He also once operated the San Francisco experimental label Root Strata, which released early albums from Grouper and Oneohtrix Point Never, among others. The sound of “The Milky Sea” is played with one hand delicately tapping a cymbal and the other flicking off piano chords. The whole thing is surrounded by a golden fog of static, one that reminds my Lynch-stuffed brain of the sound design that accompanies Laura Palmer’s floating orb in The Return. If you told me Cantu-Ledesma is playing a glass bowl here, I would believe you—it’s that hypnotic on the brain waves. This is a liminal space of a song—and a long, weary, much-needed exhale.