Protector’s Tea is the debut solo lp from thirty-year-old Gabe Celestino, a native of the Olympic Peninsula. Despite being largely recorded in isolation over the last year with minimal gear in the drab, alienating confines of an apartment building located in the midst of an industrial zone on the outskirts of Seoul, South Korea, Celestino was nevertheless able to re-imagine his dreary living quarters into a sacred space through the acts of wakefulness and creation. Celestino, a lifelong practicing Buddhist, is here above all else concerned with formed formlessness, having created a work of delicate insistence that generates fields of power even as it looks beyond language and ego. Deeply meditative, and drawing on a lineage of ambient composition reaching back to Eliane Radigue and onward to Gas, Protector’s Tea locates in dislocation the very presence of our rugged existence.
Featuring beautifully mastered sound by Jae-Soo Yi of Riverman Music in Seoul, in an edition of 300 copies housed in a sturdy, archival old-style jacket. CD package features a mounted photo print and insert.