Maridian announces Antemeridian, the opening statement of the debut EP ATTENTION.

Antemeridian is a slow, intimate jazz ballad built around a solo muted trumpet, set in D minor. The trumpet carries every phrase alone, long, breathy, unhurried, over a Fender Rhodes electric piano sustaining minor ninth voicings with extended decay. An upright bass walks in half notes beneath. Brushed drums barely surface above the threshold of silence.

The track was recorded with close-mic intimacy: the natural hiss of the brass instrument, the subtle room reflections, the silence between notes treated as compositional material rather than dead space.

The title is drawn from the Latin antemeridiem, meaning before the midday, before the meridian. The word belongs to the hours of incompletion, the part of the day that has not yet reached its peak. Antemeridian does not build toward anything. It does not resolve. It holds a single sustained emotional register for its full duration and asks the listener to hold it with the music.

Antemeridian is the opening statement of ATTENTION, a nine-track instrumental smooth jazz EP releasing one single per week through June 26, 2026, with the complete project available July 10, 2026. The catalog moves through three distinct movements, opening on muted trumpet, turning on harpsichord, and resolving on soprano saxophone before closing with a jazz-house synthesis.

Every arrangement prioritizes space over density. The production aesthetic is consistent throughout: analog tape warmth, vinyl crackle, close-mic intimacy, and reverb with long decay tails. The EP was built as a complete, sequenced listening experience.

The EP title encodes a specific reference. ATTENTION names the quality the music asks of its listener. It also names the attention mechanism, the architectural innovation introduced in the 2017 paper Attention Is All You Need, that underpins the generative systems through which the catalog was built. The music is the surface. The reference rewards those who reach it.

Maridian is an instrumental music project based in Kansas City, Missouri. ATTENTION is the debut release.