The sea does not care about your schedule.
It hits the rocks the same way every morning—patient, stupid, holy, endless—like a drum machine that predates the Flying Spaghetti Monster. I’m at the beach, coffee in one hand, salt in my beard, thinking about how life arrives sideways when you’re not looking.
Spring Festival—the largest human migration on the planet—feels like that. A wave you don’t see coming until your boots are already soaked.
Back inland, Amos the Amazing is still walking the long road without me. Book One is moving through rural libraries across Chongqing—quiet shelves, chalk dust, kids whose eyes go wide when a story opens a door they didn’t know existed. Just books doing the slow, stubborn, miraculous work of changing the weather inside a child. And the producers are hungry for a sequel.
Luckily, I’ve been planning it for the better part of a decade. It’s coming together cleanly now. The binders of worldbuilding, themes, and half-mad ideas are paying off.
That’s why I’m here. That’s the anchor.
But then—because the universe enjoys slapstick—I found myself putting on an old hat, producing a beat for a commissioned hip-hop video promoting Chongqing as the cyberpunk wonder of the modern world. They even asked me to rap. I passed. My energy’s pointed elsewhere these days.
Instead, I linked up with my friend Orlando, a UK expat, and focused on what I do best: building a beat that hits. Orlando took the mic. Ryan—aka Chinese Trump, a local viral phenomenon—rounded it out. They did the rest.
Through that shoot, I wandered into a studio that knew reggae like an old friend and hip-hop like a knife. And there — half in the light, half in the smoke — I met Reko Sunfall.
Here’s the truth, said quietly so the sea doesn’t overhear and start laughing:
None of this music was planned.
It wasn’t a “project.” It was creative residue — what spills out when you’ve been deep inside Amos 2 too long and the world of sound in that book decides it wants a body in real life.
Rhythm started acting like a living thing. Systems started feeling like beats.
Every wave sounded like a breakdown.
So I let it leak.
The studio became a second coastline. Reko and I weren’t “making tracks.” We were standing in a current and seeing where it pulled us. Sometimes we surfed. Sometimes we face-planted. Sometimes we just laughed and let the water carry us.
Out of that came JRKS — not birthed so much as washed ashore. A Lovecraftian dance EP dripping, smiling, slightly unhinged, and very ready to dance.
So here it is — a free seven-track EP on Bandcamp, dropped like a bottle into the tide of Spring Festival. Take it. Play it loud. Play it wrong. Play it on a bus, in a kitchen, on a beach where the wind sounds like it knows your name.
As the Year of the Horse charges in, I’m juggling family, drafts, waves, and that rare feeling when creativity is no longer work — it’s weather. I miss Naomi a lot, and luckily she misses me too. The news is disgusting when you love a child – what a world we live in, but we can create beauty and we can study French history if you catch my drift.
And somewhere between dumplings and drum breaks, I’ll be screaming at the Olympics like a proud, deranged Canadian with salt in his hair and fire in his chest:
Go Canada.
Go Crosby.
Go McDavid.
Go MacKinnon.
Go Marchand.
Go Makar.
Go Celebrini.
Oh my.
If the sea lets me, I’ll be back tomorrow.
If the sea takes me, tell the kids in those libraries I left them something good.
Happy Spring Festival.
See you where the beat meets the water.
— Kai
