FROM THIS STILLNESS, out on July 7, 2023, is the first half of a double album entitled THE DEPTHS OF MEMORY.

The second half, THE DEPTHS IN SLOW MOTION, is out on October 27, 2023.

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Excerpt from the liner notes, by Harmony Holiday:

On this album we receive a future unobstructed by any goofy or heavy handed attempts to align with futurism™ or the glories of the past. The tones go on skipping and stammering with the bright optimism of a child, a cheerfulness that is hesitant to occupy itself and sometimes abandons itself for the pensive or macabre. The cognition between the notes and compositions is vivid and tangible, a nonlinear narrative about moving through territory you were told was dangerous but are compelled to witness and overcome for yourself...

...[Kevin] Sun has found the balance between the intellect, or improvisational music that teaches you how to think in new patterns, and the spirit, alighted by music that revokes your access to overthinking and forces you into a trance of the present moment. The frenzy that ensues is lighthearted and interrupted by soothe and swarm. Where I expect drama to be the driving energy of the compositions, I hear only delight, but an intense delight that I haven’t heard tonally since Clifford Jordan or Mingus. What I hear is triumph so obvious it probably frightens the composer into wondering if it’s a mirage. It is not.

This album is a secret world that any wise listener begins to feel beholden to by the final initiation as song. Great jazz music has always seduced its listeners by collapsing the distance between thought and feeling until a mood that can never be imitated outside of the universe of its players and their dynamic is formed. These worlds become ghost towns, the haunts that avid listeners tell had-to-be-there stories about to keep the circle unbroken. It is a privilege to be haunted by this exact music in this era that needs new ghosts.

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Excerpt from press release:

FROM ALL THIS STILLNESS, due out July 7, 2023 via Sun’s own Endectomorph Music imprint in collaboration with la reserve records, isn’t a “pandemic record” in the way that term has quickly come to be defined. It’s not a makeshift solo outing or a dream project facilitated by a group of all-stars suddenly finding their calendars wide open. Instead, it’s an ambitious and exploratory set of music that takes vivid inspiration from the shift in perspective imposed by these recent unprecedented experiences.

“I wanted the feeling of being swept along on a current of musical thought over a long period of time,” Sun explains. “I was hoping to capture that relatively rare feeling of just taking a long walk when it's nice out, looking at leaves and trees, feeling the wind. It should be a transporting experience as opposed to the more normal daily experience, where we live with a virtual world full of constant interruptions, disruptions, and notifications.”

The composer focused on paring each piece down to its essential elements, allowing his gifted bandmates to express themselves as much as possible. “I wanted to improve upon the longer pieces I've written by condensing everything to make the music feel more immediate,” he says. “I wanted to allow my friends and collaborators to just dive in and immediately start painting the canvas. So I was relatively specific with the musical material, but tried not to have it be restrictively demanding.”

That was another urgency inadvertently born of the pandemic – an impatience to get back to collaboration after such an arduous time apart. You can feel that in the abrupt, almost in media res opening of “Frozen in Profile,” which foregoes any sort of melodic statement to kick off the album at a gallop. “Interior Choruses” follows, again arriving at the point quickly with an elusive, intense piano solo over a stealthy, odd-metered bassline, eventually bursting free into the blues feel of Sun’s solo. “Ghosts of Repetition” is a parallel piece, which its spectral repetitions and echoes.

The album includes two drastically different takes of “From Some Unseen Center,” the more abstract, cascading first version contrasted by the more insinuating, hypnotic second. “Elliptical Blue” swaggers with a slow, lurching swing, while “Shadow Meridian” closes the quartet section of the album with an ethereal almost-ballad.

Drummer Dayeon Seok steps in along with trumpeter Adam O’Farrill for “Eponymous Cycle,” which was inspired by a live 1950 Charlie Parker recording featuring an extended solo over the changes of “Fine and Dandy.” As on his previous album <3 BIRD, Sun extrapolated the raw material of Bird’s solo, expanding on and reimagining it for his own ensemble.