Delphinus is a five-track album by Joss Jaffe and Jim "Kimo" West, introduced by a roughly five-minute video in which Jaffe narrates the record's themes, song highlights, production, and composing approach. The album is being entered for awards consideration in the New Age, Ambient, and Chant category, and the video works partly as a short case for that entry. This article is built from the video's description and track list rather than a full transcript, so it reads the record through what its creators chose to put in front of listeners: a set of titles that move through water, from the surface down to a layer in the middle of the sea.
Five minutes is a short window, and the video's own description is candid about its job. It is a voiceover, not a performance. The description says Jaffe describes "themes and song highlights of the album including production, composing, & inspirational overtones." In other words, the video is an orientation: a guide to how the record was made and what it is meant to carry, delivered before the listener hears a note of it in full.
That matters for how you approach the material. A voiceover like this tells you where to stand. It names the frame (production, composition, inspiration) so that when the music arrives, you know which questions the artists were asking. If you are coming to Delphinus cold, the video is the closest thing to a liner note, and it is worth hearing before you judge the album by its first track.
The five titles are "Party Wave," "Abhogi (Colorful Water)," "Dolphin Star," "Thermocline," and "Wake Riding." Read in order, they gesture at the ocean in layers. There are waves and wakes, the surface-level motion of boats and water. There is a dolphin, an animal that lives in that moving world, paired with a star, which points upward into sky. Then comes "Thermocline," a word from the depths. The sequence is suggestive rather than explicit, and the description does not spell out a narrative. But the titles share a single element, water, and that consistency is itself a creative decision worth noticing.
The Sanskrit-style word "Abhogi" is the one title the material explains only partly. Its parenthetical gloss, "Colorful Water," is given in the track listing, and the description does not say more about the word. Rather than guess at its meaning, it is enough to notice the pairing: an unfamiliar word set beside a plain English image, which invites the listener to hold both at once.
A thermocline is a layer of water in which temperature drops quickly as depth increases. It sits between the warmer, sunlit water at the surface and the colder water below, and it works as a kind of boundary, a place where the ocean changes character within a short vertical distance. For a listener, the word carries a useful image: a threshold that you pass through rather than stay in.
Naming a track "Thermocline" places a scientific term inside a record described as New Age, Ambient, and Chant. That pairing is a small, telling move. Ambient and chant music often aim at stillness and suspension, and a thermocline is, in its own way, a suspended zone. Whether the music of that track is built on that idea is something only the recording can answer, but the title sets up the expectation that the listener is moving through a changing medium rather than sitting in one flat tone.
"FYC" stands for "For Your Consideration," the phrase used when creators submit work for awards review. The video's description states that Delphinus is "FYC Eligible in the New Age, Ambient, & Chant Category" and closes with a request for consideration. Placing an album in a specific category is a practical act. It tells reviewers which peers the work should be measured against, and it frames the record as belonging to a lineage of ambient and devotional sound rather than to pop or conventional song forms.
For a listener, the category label is useful shorthand. "New Age" points toward meditative, open textures. "Ambient" suggests music that can sit in the background or be attended to closely, depending on the listener. "Chant" implies voice, repetition, and devotional intent. Delphinus is placed across all three, which signals that its creators see those categories as overlapping rather than separate. The description does not elaborate on how each category applies to specific tracks, so that is a question to bring to the music itself.
Start with the video, then listen to the album in track order. The sequence of titles is worth following because it gives you a loose map: the surface energy of "Party Wave," the play of "Dolphin Star," the descent of "Thermocline," and the motion of "Wake Riding" at the end. You do not need to decode every image. Let the titles set your attention, then notice where the sound shifts with them.
It is also worth listening for the things the video names: production choices, composing decisions, and the "inspirational overtones" the description mentions. Those are the parts of an ambient or chant record that tend to reveal the most on repeated listens, because they operate below the level of melody. A record like this rewards patience. The sea, as the titles suggest, is rarely still for long, even when it looks calm from above.
Watch the five-minute video first, since it is the artists' own framing of the album. Then read the track list alongside it and listen to Delphinus from the first track through to "Wake Riding." If you are interested in the awards category, the description's FYC line tells you the context the album was submitted under. The video had 92 views when this piece was prepared, so it is an early and quiet release, and a good time to listen closely. The description does not list a release platform, so for where to hear the full record, look to the artists' own channels and the video's page.
