Listen to No-No Boy's "Little Monk," from his Smithsonian Folkways album Empire Electric. No-No Boy describes “Little Monk” as the heart of his new album. The song is a personal reflection on his time spent at Vietnamese Buddhist teacher and writer Thích Nhất Hạnh's Blue Cliff monastery in upstate New York. Sung with a collected exuberance over a nearly baroque arrangement of guitars and strings, "Little Monk" reflects on No-No Boy's process of embracing difficulty and contradiction, and of feeling calm in the face of injustice.

There are seemingly infinite layers of meaning to be found in No-No Boy’s third album, Empire Electric. You can listen closely to singer-songwriter Julian Saporiti’s lyrics, which juxtapose true stories of struggle from throughout Asia and its diaspora with Saporiti’s own reckoning with intergenerational trauma. You could also let the majesty of Saporiti’s songcraft wash over you, his captivating melodies cloaking those themes in a veneer of hope and ecstasy. But the deepest storytelling happens at the sonic level, as sounds drawn from across the Eastern hemisphere mingle freely with distinctly American instrumentation – banjo and koto, lap-steel and guzheng – while electronically manipulated field recordings of rushing water, chirping birds and other natural sounds ground us in the now. Adventurous and affecting, Empire Electric offers a vision for a new kind of folk music, one that tells unorthodox stories through unorthodox means and finds new pathways through our tangled roots.