Kevin Bronson on June 13th, 2017

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Josh Dooley has been making music as MAP since 2000, amassing three albums and three EPs as well as contributing his echoing guitar textures to artists like Starflyer 59, Fine China and Pony Express. But until last week, MAP had been MIA since 2009’s “Speechless,” and now we know the reasons. Blocked, he took a break from music, before relocating to Pasadena in 2015, with his mind on rebooting. Then he contracted the rare West Nile Virus. At one point paralyzed from the neck down, Dooley spent six weeks in the hospital. Slowly, he recovered, but the ordeal gave him a new perspective: “What that experience did for me, was to make me appreciate life,” he says. “I remember laying there just wishing I could move my thumb and fingers enough to text someone. The smallest, simplest things in life had been taken from me. Things that now I recognize as being so valuable.”

The ordeal informed MAP’s new EP, “Hello Singularity (Writer’s Block Part One),” out Friday via SoCal label Velvet Blue Music. Here, MAP’s lush, cinematic and often-melancholy indie-rock takes on an assertive edge; the title track shimmers like light off a pond in the forest. “Garden grows / water flows,” he sings simply. “The lyrics were inspired by my own recovery and the simultaneous loss of my best friend René from a genetic kidney disease, and how it taught me fear in general is pointless,” Dooley says. “Fear can’t keep your friends alive, fear won’t keep someone from leaving you. I should take a chance and open myself up to the possibility of hurt and disappointment in life because whatever happens, I now have the skills to rebuild.”

The EP, recorded at singer-guitarist’s home with Mike Perez (electronics) and Rob Withem (drums) and mixed by Ken Ramos (an editor on “American Horror Story” and “Twin Peaks”), will be followed in the fall by “Writer’s Block Part Two.”

||| Stream: “Skills to Rebuild”