Some albums speak. Others whisper. And then there are those, like "Re: Communicating", that simply breathe - softly, patiently, letting every note settle like a footprint in freshly fallen snow. Nicole Miglis, best known as the spectral voice and principal songwriter of Hundred Waters, has revisited the band’s last album "Communicating" (2017) not by embellishing it, but by distilling it. What was once an intricate blend of electronic textures, dreamlike vocals, and avant-pop production has been reborn through a single instrument: the piano.

Stripping a record down to its bones is a risky endeavor. It risks revealing too much, or worse, too little. But "Re: Communicating" is neither an erasure nor a mere translation - it is an act of transformation, a quiet metamorphosis where Miglis’ compositions are no longer songs but places, each piece unfolding like a remembered landscape.

The story behind "Re: Communicating" is as ethereal as the album itself. The project began as a curiosity: a self-playing piano that was meant to ghost its way through transcriptions of "Communicating" at the album’s 2017 launch party, held in a Hollywood cemetery’s Masonic Lodge. The idea was left unrealized, a spectral concept lingering in the ether until Miglis rediscovered her own unfinished transcriptions years later. What began as a technical exercise became something personal: a conversation not just with her past work, but with the instrument itself.

Miglis, a classically trained pianist, set a strict two-week window to complete the recordings, alone in a rented Washington D.C. studio. The resulting pieces are performed without a metronome, allowing them to sway organically, unmoored from rigid timing. In doing so, "Re: Communicating" feels less like a collection of songs and more like a living, breathing entity - one that expands and contracts with an intuitive sense of motion.

What’s remarkable is how each track on "Re: Communicating" doesn’t merely recall its "Communicating" counterpart but refracts it, shifting its emotional weight through touch alone. "(better)", once a glimmering electro-pop anthem, is now a tender meditation, its optimism less declarative and more fragile, like light filtering through drawn curtains. The playful staccatos of "(wave to anchor)" dance across the keys like scattered raindrops, while "(firelight)" flickers with a warmth that feels both comforting and distant.

Then there’s "communicating I & II", the album’s closing diptych. In its original form, "Communicating" was a record that sought to understand connection - how we express, misinterpret, and long for meaning between one another. Here, in the absence of voice, that longing is left to the resonance of the keys, cascading in waves before dissolving into silence.

Miglis has long been a shape-shifter, moving between electronic production, ambient experiments (under her alias Batry Powr), and rich vocal work as both a solo artist and guest performer for Bonobo. But "Re: Communicating" feels like something different: not a reinvention, but a return. A rediscovery of simplicity, of melody, of the small spaces between notes where emotion lingers longest.

She once described the album as something “to soundtrack a room”. And indeed, it is - though not as mere background music. It is the kind of record that seeps into the air, filling the space like memory itself. Like its title suggests, "Re: Communicating" isn’t a repetition but a response - a quiet, deeply felt reply to something once said, now understood differently.