The result may be serene but the recording process gave Ezell more headaches and proved more complicated than he initially expected. Even with the lessons learnt during his previous recording, Ezell still found the three months he spent in the studio to be both frustrating and laborious.
"I knew what I wanted to create and I knew how to go about it, but I found that while it's great to create something new, playing the same tunes over and over was too much," he said. "I'd pick up a guitar and it felt like dead wood. It was like I was in a fog."
With the deadline fast approaching and Ezell's patience wearing thin, it was to be a visit to a friend's house and an introduction to an instrument known as a mbira one evening that proved to be the solution to his recording woes. After toying with the African thumb piano, however, Ezell was once again, "infused with creative energy."
This burst of creative energy enabled Ezell to complete the project on time. Mastered in Taipei by Chen Guan-yu (
The album comprises 12 tracks. Along with various types of guitar, Ezell employs a harmonica, Chinese flute, bamboo percussion, djembe (African hand drum), banjo, acoustic bass and jew's harp. Ocean Hieroglyphics is a diverse anthology of musical sounds and one that evokes a sense of space and the natural environment within the listener.
There's a meandering pace to all of the tunes, yet Ocean Hieroglyphics is far from repetitive or lifeless. Ezell's employment of such a vast array of instrumentation, along with the spontaneity of the material, ensures freshness. Just as the listener expects Ezell to go in one direction a slight of hand and the appearance of a sudden, seemingly random hook or riff takes them in the other.
Although Ezell recorded sounds of nature for the album by placing microphones on his porch -- on a couple of tunes these sounds are evident -- he opted to avoid the trappings of many a Wind release and reproduce nature verbatim.
Initially setting out to follow Wind's long tradition of filling albums with ambient sounds of nature in order to enhance their recordings, Ezell soon dropped this idea, feeling that such sounds were distracting.
"I did record birds and the ocean, but there was a feeling of falsity or contrivance about it all," he said. "I wanted the music to evoke the theme of the song and be able to envision the natural world through the music. I wanted the sounds of nature to be inherent in the music itself."
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