For Greg Lisher, Underwater Detection Method is a thing of firsts. Sure, he’s a familiar face to most fans of made-in-California alternative rock (thanks to his work with Camper Van Beethoven and Monks of Doom) and this is not his first solo record, yet listening to it has all the feel of discovering a new artist for the first time. Before Underwater Detection Method, Lisher had never written songs on a keyboard, he had never self-produced an album nor played bass on one, he had never arranged strings nor programmed a synthesizer. Always a lover of keyboards and synthesizers - and of the more experimental excursions of favorite artists such as Brian Eno and Richard Barbieri, as well as of enlightening jewels from Yellow Magic Orchestra and its three members’ rich solo output -, after completing the guitar-based Songs from the Imperial Garden in 2012 (a collection of instrumentals brimming with acoustic intimacy that he would finally release in 2020) he thought it time to start exploring a new world of software, keys and synthesized sounds. The result is a spacious balm of a record that sits evenly between ambient, library music and electronic soundtracks, conjuring an inspired fusion that manages to split the difference between the melodic and the experimental. With this new album Lisher approached songwriting with an all-is-possible disposition - he’d start a new song without knowing where it was going to go, letting the sound take him to places he did not expect.