Fletcher Tucker — Big Sur artist, Esalen faculty member, independent musician, and wilderness guide — is a kind of spiritual cartographer and wild-hearted philosopher of the sonic and sacred.

He has a new album, Kin, which is the focus of this conversation. Kin is a ritual, a spell, a window into the more-than-human world. It is a collection of drone-based, chant-infused compositions built with ancestral instruments like Swedish bagpipes, bowed zithers, and elder flutes.

In this conversation, Fletcher walks us through the making of Kin, which emerged over years of wilderness pilgrimage through the Big Sur backcountry; songs that were written while walking, chanted into being beside waterfalls and totemic boulders, assembled later with vintage Mellotrons, and dulcimers that seem to hum with the memory of older worlds.

We talk animism, and Fletcher’s embrace of a concentric, non-hierarchical cosmology where stones, rivers, ancestors, and unborn children all participate in the great chorus of being. We talk proximity and kinship and enchantment; “Radical Permeability” as Altered State; the Tassajara Zen Center Influence; Emotional and Aesthetic Complexity; Birth as Ceremony; life-threatening snowstorms; Polyphonic Compositions; clear vinyl and Streaming and Digital Ethics; and Wildtender, the organization Fletcher co-founded with his wife, Noel Vietor.