The Mariner Hospitality of the Coffee Ceremony is a cinematic scripted audio musical that moves across oceans, memory, and myth. At its heart is a long lost ancient Eritrean folk tale (recovered by the poet Ribka Sibhatu) about Emperor Merso and (with his two sons Miren & Gemel) the moment power split the visible world into the purely visible and the purely invisible. From that rupture, the first African spirits were born.

Blending narration, immersive soundscape, and an original score woven from Eritrean, Yemeni, West African, African-American and European musical textures, the work travels from the Red Sea to the Great Lakes, from maritime empires to modern migration patterns borne from war and climate crisis. It asks: What did we carry when everything else was taken? What survived the crossing?

The answer arrives through the coffee (boon) ceremony. Here, fire meets water. Bean becomes liquid. Strangers sit. The act of pouring becomes an act of remembering and forged kinship. Coffee becomes more than drink—it becomes a bridge between worlds, a method of listening & rebuilding community in a time of planetary loneliness.

This is not simply a story about migration. It is about what migration reveals—about power, about memory, about the illusion that anyone survives alone. It is about how a people once shaped by empire and sea learned, through loss, that dominion fractures but relation endures. How exile becomes encounter. How the crossing becomes classroom. How the coffee ceremony becomes a quiet rebellion against a world that trains us to remain strangers.

Here, hospitality is not etiquette. It is an ethic learned from water—an understanding that we move as currents, not islands. That what is poured is also what binds. That what rises as smoke carries counsel from the invisible.

This is an epic carried by smoke, sound, and sea—where the mariner remembers that survival is collective, and every cup is a crossing.

Produced by Aaron Joseph, Matthew Joseph, and Andrew Kozyn for TrethWest & Soker.

Since 1986, when Zapp & Roger wired romance into Computer Love, and 1995, when the first online dating site flickered to life, we've been spiraling deeper into a Love Apocalypse. The heart’s been hacked, the game’s been gamified, and love? Well, love's been left buffering.

In this Valentine’s Day special, Aharon charts the digital contagion—how swiping right became a reflex, ghosting turned ritual, and trolling one’s crush became an advanced flirting strategy. How did we go from checking for tender-roonis to tinder-roonis? From waiting nervously at a café for a blind date to being catfished for a calendar year (apologies to Manti Te’O)? People can’t even tell if it's Valentine’s Day or Halloween anymore—ghosting got them shook.

But don’t worry, love warriors. We’ve got strategies to debug the heart and reclaim romance from the algorithmic abyss. With live performances from Aharon & the Love Savers, poetry from our own A. Love, and deep insights from Professor Jemer, the Love Anthropologist, this episode is a survival guide for those still searching for a signal in the static.

Love may be absent, but that doesn’t mean it’s forgotten.

Produced by Soker.

Music provided by TrethWest.

In this NO GPS After Sunset episode, we reimagine Weston-Mount Dennis not as a neglected periphery, but as "The City of Our Dreaming"—a title borrowed from the radical insights of Christina Sharpe's 2024 Alchemy Lecture Series. This is no ordinary retelling; it is a sonic and spatial Black history, reassembled and resurrected to defy the dictates of Empire.

We dismantle the colonial narratives that reduce this territory to urban blight, flipping the script to unveil an emancipatory geography rooted in care, community, and the audacious brilliance of radical imagination. Each act of the episode layers scholarship, music, and storytelling to craft an interconnected vision of the future—one where education, architecture, and economies of reciprocity form the bedrock of liberation.

Guided by Saidiya Hartman's critical fabulations and the transformative power of utopian dreaming, this episode doesn’t just tell history; it remakes it. Absence becomes presence, melancholia transforms into resilience, and Black life transcends the constraints of Euro-modernity to flourish as it was always meant to—unbound, unapologetic, and alive with possibility.

This is NO GPS After Sunset at its most daring: an offering of liberation and renewal for a territory that refuses to be forgotten. Tune in, and let us build a world where dreaming itself becomes a radical act of creation.