This album was recorded at Liu Ying Studio in Shenzhen. An improvised session on acoustic guitar from start to finish, it nonetheless demonstrates a highly original, coherent artistic conception: a distinct “Oriental” aesthetic redefined by Mamer’s own creative vision.

In tracks like “Sleepless”, “Man from the East”, and “Backyard”, Mamer ingeniously deconstructs and deploys traditional Han Chinese music scales to serve his own purpose, adding artful ambivalence and rich subtleties to an unmistakable lingering ambience of ancient Chinese spirituality. Tracks like “Punk Long Johns” and “Bande”, on the other hand, are sonic and rhythmic experiments upon “Nearer East” musical traditions: techniques of strumming, typical to Central Asian plucked string instruments, are applied to an acoustic guitar with constantly changing tunings, sometimes by the help of drumsticks or a screwdriver. In the track “Tursun Matia”, Mamer plays his guitar as if it was possessed by the spirit of a Dolan Rawap—an emotional tribute to his lifelong friend Tursun Matia, the late master of Mekit Dolan Muqam.

Uyⱪesez (or Sleepless) sees Mamer reimagines the “Orient” from a unique position as an other of the othered. A man from the East with pale fire snatched from the sun, with strings that transcend the boundaries of time.