Never/Land is an interactive album rooted in the emotional afterlives of slavery. Composed as part of Ace’s honors thesis in African and African American Studies at Stanford, the project explores the psychic weight of Afro-pessimism and social death through the portals of sound, adventure, and collective memory.

Drawing from the work of Saidiya Hartman, Frank Wilderson, Christina Sharpe, and Toni Cade Bambara, Never/Land contends with how Blackness is bound to the unlivable. And yet, through sonic conjure and embodied stillness, the album creates a placeless sanctuary — a space where Black affect is honored, where grief is welcomed as transformation, and where impermanence gives birth to beauty.

Each track emerged from a process of emotional excavation — songwriting as a form of mourning, ancestral invocation, and speculative geography. The result is not a linear story but a loop: a ritual of return, reflection, and rebirth. From rusted chairs in overgrown fields to improvised breathing ceremonies, Never/Land asks: What happens when we grieve what we've lost — and discover we were never alone?

Never/Land is an invitation to wander, to wonder, and to build home in the act of becoming.

Listeners are invited into a ritual of wayfinding:

• Take a walk down an unfamiliar path

• Play the album

• Record moments of unexpected beauty — a sound, an image, a breath

• DM findings to @thelandthatneverwas on Instagram, an evolving archive of the wayward