二〇二六年七月二十日下午,我在鋼琴上即興彈了一段《大河》。

One July afternoon I improvised a piece called The River on my piano.

這張 EP 的每一顆音,都不是那天彈的;但每一顆音,都因為那天才存在。

Not a single note on this EP was played that day — yet every note exists only because of it.

我們把那段錄音的數位指紋當作種子,交給一套自己寫的演算法——聲音百分之百是機器生成的,可是會生成哪一首,由我的琴決定。

We took the digital fingerprint of that recording as a seed and gave it to an algorithm we built ourselves. The sound is entirely machine-generated; which music gets generated was decided by my piano.

方法是把中國最老的生律法「三分損益」做成一道棘輪:整張專輯從一個音開始,徵、商、羽、角,一律一律地生出來,你會親耳聽到一個音階誕生的過程。

The method turns san-fen-sun-yi — China's oldest tuning procedure — into a ratchet: the whole album begins from a single tone, and you hear a musical scale being born, one pitch at a time.

第一步生出來的是純五度——後來對過《史記·律書》記載的弦長,分毫不差。

The first pitch born is a perfect fifth. We later checked it against the string lengths recorded in the Shiji. Identical.

原來那天下午,我的手本來就停在第二律上。

That afternoon, my hand had already been resting on the second pitch.

六首是同一個世界的六個階段:息、止水、雲行、深觀、夜光、迴向。

Six tracks are six stages of one world: Breath, Still Water, Moving Clouds, Deep Insight, Night Light, Dedication.

板眼隨業,由散板漸嚴至一板三眼;唯一不動的,是貫穿全張的那一句「名」——五聲鎖死,業與旋宮都碰不到它。

The rhythm tightens as karma accrues. The one thing that never moves is the Name — a chanted cell locked inside the pentatonic, untouched by karma and modulation.

亂的會愈來愈亂,不動的始終不動。

What is chaotic grows ever more chaotic. What is still remains still.

這就是業,這也是名。

That is karma. That is the Name.