Alex Pasternak

Offshore is the first solo guitar album from the Half Moon Bay local, an improvisatory record built almost entirely around a single instrument and a single practice: Restraint.
Recorded close to home, it carries the sound of the Pacific and the voices of his two young daughters as they stroll the shoreline, from serene minus tides to stormy shore break.

Offshore, in surfing, is used to describe the strong winds that blow from the shore to the sea, creating space inside the curl – but it’s also an accurate description of my two decades away from home, and the return to the coast. – Alex Pasternak

Written and played alone, Offshore traces Pasternak’s reconnection with the beach where he was raised, and with the patience that solo playing demands.
Guided by the spirit of Dan Lissvik’s Studio, Vini Reilly, Ennio Morricone, and – on the album’s more folk-leaning pieces – David Pajo (Papa M), Jim O’Rourke, John Fahey, and the quieter corners of the Windham Hill catalogue – the record unfolds as a set of celestial surf-guitar meditations and ambient ocean odysseys. Album highlight and lone cover, an unhurried arrangement of John Coltrane’s Naima, sits comfortably among the originals.

Threaded through the record are recordings of Pasternak’s daughters, Cecilia and Esme, caught mid-laughter and mid-conversation on the sand – moments left unpolished and in the open, in the tradition of Laraaji’s laughter meditation workshops and the other childhood voices that have found their way onto records he loves. They arrive not as texture but as a kind of company: small, unguarded sounds that Pasternak hopes might offer someone, somewhere, the same lift they give him every time he presses play.