The mind of Ghibli is a fascinating place. At the moment, zen house music and the written Mandarin language are making total sense together in here. Access is available above, and a bit of clarity as to what’s going on, from the man himself, is below:

“I’m taking Mandarin classes and Mandarin’s text is purely pictographic. There are something like 30 to 50 thousand characters in Mandarin but to be considered ‘literate’ you only need an understanding of about 3,000 characters. Those 30-50 thousand characters are divided into 189 subsets called Radicals that feature base themes or super simple designs, which is how mandarin dictionaries are organized (by radical). So from within this absolute sea of characters, there are only 5-10% of which one actually needs. Because inside that 5-10%, one character can easily encompass 4 or 10 different synonyms. Not to mention there are 5-10 characters themselves that sort of mean the same thing anyway. So you could say one word that could mean 10 things at once. Or alternately, 10 words that mean 50 things in succession. And I just think this is the coolest.

So I’ve taken a thorough bred selection of slower tracks that have been passively floating around my mind and anchored them into this mix. From the millions of house tracks that exist, I figure that people could get by on these eleven tracks for a while. I’ve chosen this character 缓, which means slow, leisurely, relaxed, etc.”

Thanks, Tom Mike!