Thirteen minutes of animated ambient from Denver, where five remastered tracks from Chakra Supernova transform into an anime saga about a goddess battling darkness. The project of Matthew Nurse and violinist Stephanie Lee is accompanied by a guerrilla sticker campaign with QR codes across the streets of Chicago, Denver, and Boulder.

mOXIE mOTIVE is a project from Denver, built by the hands of one person. Matthew Nurse writes, records, and produces all the material, while violinist Stephanie Lee adds expressive strings that lend additional depth to an already dense texture. The sound carries a distinct kinship with Radiohead — the same spatial guitar trails, the same gravitational pull toward ambient depth — but reworked through the lens of cinematic ambient that breathes slower and targets different nerve endings. The newly released EP ANIMOXIE – Starstone Saga: The Eternal Lives of Keket takes five select tracks from the album Chakra Supernova and rebirths them into a thirteen-minute original anime music video — a format that, on its own, deserves a separate conversation. Anime long ago outgrew the confines of the screen.

Its visual logic — frame-based thinking, linear dramaturgy, the crescendo from silence to catharsis — has grown into music more deeply than it appears at first glance. It is enough to recall Nujabes, whose beats became the soundtrack to Samurai Champloo, or Flying Lotus, who built entire albums along animated blueprints. Music tethered to anime narrative has existed for a long time, and it exists in two aggregate states: either as accompaniment to the image, or as sovereign territory where sound generates visuality from within.

The second variant is far more difficult, because it demands from the musician the mindset of a screenwriter — the ability to construct an arc through timbres, textures, and transitions — and from the viewer (precisely the viewer, because here the ear yields to the eye) a willingness to submerge into the offered world entirely, for all thirteen minutes. This is precisely why mOXIE mOTIVE simultaneously launched a guerrilla sticker campaign with QR codes across the streets of Chicago, Denver, and Boulder on 4/20 weekend: hundreds of stickers functioning as entry points, instantly teleporting passersby into the saga.

The opening track, “Dulce Keket,“ establishes the coordinates of the entire EP within its first seconds. Twilight keys unfurl slowly, viscously, with a tactile dampness — and the space they shape immediately reads as landscape: a fog-shrouded forest, moss-covered stones, a dawn haze through which the heroine’s figure moves, a sorcerous elixir in her hands. Acoustic effects operate with surgical precision, underscoring the mystical character of the track, and the result is a sensation of ancient stillness, saturated with anticipation. Magic at this stage still slumbers, but the foundation is already laid.

“Prana“ opens the vortex of battle. The dark pulsation of electronic ambient swells in waves, and within that swelling one hears the approach of the enemy — a dark force aimed at the heroine’s energy. Here the EP steps onto the terrain of genuine tension for the first time: passions boil, the electronic fabric thickens, pressure mounts. The heroine accepts the challenge. The enemy retreats. But beyond this level the next one already looms — the logic of a video game, embedded in the musical dramaturgy, works flawlessly.

“The Hit“ transports the action into a glass labyrinth. Here the vocals awaken — drowsy, whispering directions to the goddess in a half-voice. Glass panels glitter with venomous lights, blades threaten the heroine from every side, and she presses forward, scattering sorcerous poison across her opponents. Stellar glow, toxic glimmers — the track pulses with visual imagery so densely that the boundaries between music and animation dissolve entirely. The track’s finale leaves the question open: whether the labyrinth has been conquered — each listener decides for themselves.

On “Holding Hands,“ the EP executes a tonal turn. The keys open up the space of a Japanese garden — pink cherry blossoms, lilies, the still surface of a lotus pond. There is noticeably more light here than in the preceding tracks, time decelerates, and the acoustics fill the fabric of the song with large, almost tactile floral imagery. The fog parts, if only partially. The heroine pauses at the pond, absorbing a beauty she may be seeing for the last time. A reprieve before the final battle — and this reprieve is infused with melancholy in precisely the right dosage.

The closing track, “Patience,” returns the venomous tension but alters its nature. What is demanded of the heroine now is endurance. The fog thickens, the metallic pressure in the arrangement intensifies, and the entire construction of the EP contracts to a single point of concentration. Relaxing here is already physically difficult — the music holds you in the state of a coiled spring. The finale sounds like an ellipsis: the EP concludes, yet the sensation of continuation hangs in the air, stoking intrigue for the next chapter.

The EP operates entirely at a single speed — slow, ritualistic, submerged in fog. Five consecutive tracks in this mode is a deliberate choice, and it generates a powerful immersive effect, but by the finale the ear begins to ache for contrast. “Holding Hands” provides the sole tonal shift across the entire EP, and that feels slightly insufficient. Although, it is worth remembering that Starstone Saga was conceived as a video format — and in tandem with animation, this monotemporality registers differently: the image takes on the contrast that the sound consciously surrenders.

And this is where the EP triumphs over its own limitations. The anime music video format is a move that transforms five remastered tracks into chapters of a unified narrative, and Keket — goddess of the darkening sky, armed with secret knowledge — becomes the anchor holding everything together.

Nurse has already announced the album Seed Nova for early 2027, promising to go deeper into bass-and-drum territory — in his own phrasing, “Spoon meets Tame Impala and Hans Zimmer, dancing in a pyramid.” If Starstone Saga is the meditative portal, then the next chapter promises an entirely different pulse. For now — thirteen minutes, a screen, headphones, and a goddess gathering her strength in the fog. As an entry point into the world of mOXIE mOTIVE — an absolutely sufficient dose.

*This review was made possible by SubmitHub