Mauro Remiddi once ran away to join the circus. The circus was in Berlin and Mauro was 21 years old and at the time he was a street musician earning his living in Florence. Traveling with the circus he played accordion and percussion and violin while acrobats flew above the stage and magicians plied their tricks for the crowd.

Soon after this he found himself in North Korea, a visiting musical ambassador for Italy somehow shaking hands with Kim Jong-un in a display of state-orchestrated propaganda, an experience that drastically reconfigured his outlook for the rest of his life. Mauro remembers the astonishment of the people he encountered, none of whom had ever seen a Western face before.

To be a stranger in a strange land has been a recurrent theme across his career.

Born in Rome, his three decades as a journeyman musician have taken him from London to New York and now his new home of Los Angeles. His new EP as Porcelain Raft, Half Awake, was written and recorded in Greenpoint, mixed by Chris Coady at the legendary Sunset Sounds in Los Angeles and mastered by Heba Kadry. Half Awake will be available on Volcanic Field, Remiddi’s own new boutique art label.

Volcanic Field hails a new chapter for Remiddi ’I felt the need to create a house for all my music and ideas. A sort of archive, a diary of my work in progress, for the sake to tell the story and tell it all.’

It’s about the different way we explore new sounds and how the format influences our perception of it. It’s about how to return to listening to music in a slow, deliberate and appreciative act and how he might prevent his work from being lost in the stream. Where algorithms make our choices for us and the act of accumulating music for its own sake is a compulsion that most of us don’t think about, not realizing our loss of agency in choosing what to pay attention to; to really listen.

Half Awake will be released digitally and physically on cassette. The limited edition cassettes come with a run of linoleum prints, each hand printed in Remiddi’s home studio in LA.

The format choice for this EP comes from a long-held reverence for the sound of cassette tapes. Remiddi made his first music as a teenager on a four track and continues to enjoy the aural textures of the medium, its sound is a comfort of sorts, like a constant.

The songs on Half Awake are about letting go; of places and of expectations. The EP came into being at a juncture when Remiddi relocated from New York to Los Angeles, and explores a compassionate breaking with past selves and the places they’ve lived. Familiar androgynous vocals glide beneath dreamy keyboard washes and infinitely recurring guitars chime above a protagonist who has “Something after me, whatever is after me, I don’t want to touch the ground.”

Half Awake is out through Volcanic Field on June 2nd.