- music, j coffee
- short story, j coffee
- painting, lisa lennon
- digital & vinyl mastering, audible oddities
The Maze is a vinyl-only LP by Josh Coffee released on Still Out There Somewhere.
Previously on streaming services, the record has been removed and isolated to its intended format: vinyl, pressed by Hellbender and mastered for vinyl by AudibleOddities.
The artwork by Lisa Lennon, which is a portrait of Rayne York, was the inspiration for the human-written story that's printed on the back of the jacket.
This short story has to do with time, and considers time itself as a kind of maze, an idea heavily influenced by the short stories of Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, particularly his story "The Garden of Forking Paths". Along with Borges, Edgar Allan Poe's "Metzengerstein" was an influence.
This idea of time as a maze makes its way into the music. There are moments on the album where the music is reversed and repurposed, as if recontextualizing one time as another.
Together with the artwork, the story, the song titles, and the music itself, there is a meeting of mediums, a feeling, that can't be captured in other formats.