Such beautiful work my friend 
you should be very proud with how this turned out.
The first album has an air of melancholy and mystery, especially the song structures you use where your voice comes in half way through—I find that so pleasantly surprising and intriguing every time. But the song that stuck out to me especially on my most recent listen is “GRIN”
now that we’ve grown weary of our skin, it’s all about contact again
the feelings of isolation and separation and anxiety are represented without being fetishized. as you say, you’re engaging with “a constructive alternative to pessimism” which I think is wonderfully put, because it’s not exactly optimism, but it is about continuing, fighting the despair, building the future. The second album offers the perfect counterpoint in this sense—an ecological answer to the question of futurity posed by the first album.
I think about our walks along Seaweed Point and the Galway coast at the beginning of this pandemic, when everything was uncertain. The song we collaborated on, “Seaweed Point II”, perfectly captures that moment and that feeling for me—the melody you found for that is so full of the tension and sentiment of the bottled-up emotion of the moment, the unknown of what it would be like to go back home, what “the future” even means now, but also the beauty of that moment—the climbing around scraggy rocks along the shore line, being clattered by the wind (there should be sound, do you hear it loud?), in a place we might never return to, and a moment lost in the passing of time. That song makes me tear up every time.
Thank you for sharing your work, it’s been a comfort and a challenge to me in these weird times, as we circle some bizarre notion of a “return to normal”, these albums stand as a testament to this moment—the romance of loss/the loss of romance, the presence of nature/the nature of presence—and to human life. Congratulations again on an enormous achievement 
