Over the Sea / Under the Water (EP)

Released August 13, 2010

This handcrafted EP traces the early outline of Cicada. A kitten on a night sidewalk, moving from fragility through recovery to a new footing — glimpsed through a window, its arc rendered in piano as the buoyant steps of leaving home. A rare family journey, joy lifting into flight before emotion dips sharply downward. These pieces hold no simple major-key cheer or minor-key sorrow; every feeling arrives incomplete, grained with sand and mist.

Cicada began with Jesy Chiang, who spent five years as a pop musician before deciding to forge her own path. The EP captures that moment of departure: the pull between past and present, and the resolve to keep walking forward even when the story carries its share of hurt.

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This EP marks a formative moment for the ensemble, capturing the tentative beauty of beginnings. The compositions unfold like sketches from a journey still in progress, each track a snapshot of emotional terrain that resists easy categorization. There is a quiet intimacy here, as if the music were written in pencil rather than ink, leaving room for revision and growth. The interplay between piano and strings carries a delicate tension, never settling into comfortable resolution. It is music that breathes with the uncertainty of dawn, when shapes are still emerging from shadow and the path ahead remains unwritten.

The title evokes two elemental realms, suggesting a world divided yet connected by the same currents. This duality runs through the recording, where lightness and weight, clarity and haze exist side by side. The EP's handcrafted quality feels deliberate, a choice to preserve the grain and texture of raw expression rather than polish it smooth. Each piece seems to hover at the threshold between memory and anticipation, never fully committing to either. The result is a sonic landscape that feels both personal and universal, like fragments of a story told in half-light.

Cicada's early work already reveals a distinct voice, one that would deepen and expand in later releases. Here the seeds of their signature sound are visible: the preference for narrative arcs over conventional structures, the use of silence as a compositional element, the willingness to let emotions remain unresolved. These pieces do not explain themselves but instead invite the listener to inhabit their spaces. The EP stands as a testament to the power of artistic restraint, proving that the most profound expressions often arrive not in declarations but in the spaces between notes, in the breath before the next phrase begins.