How Do You Listen to Holy Ghosts?
It’s been a minute since I updated this thing. I got derailed by a flood of new social sites I’m supposed to sign up for. So I did, one after the other, each subsequent app ringing a little more hollow than the previous. It’s enough to make you feel not so geat about the internet, a feeling that lead to me neglecting this space. Well, not really neglecting. To be honest, I’ve continued logging in to read other people’s brilliant takes and tinker with a few half-assed blogs, trying to shape them into coherent statements (topics include the Christian mysticism of Lana Del Rey and UFO abductee comic books). But this summer, in Phoenix, Arizona, who has the fortitude to maintain coherence? The sun has blasted it away, like the First Big One at Los Alamos in Oppenheimer. All there is the stubborn march forward in the summer, through the bleak heat, which I suspect is why it’s so hard for us to deviate from all the paths that end up exacerbating the climate crisis—they are wired in, automatic responses produced by a culture that continues to sprawl out beyond its means.
I have kept busy at Aquarium Drunkard and WASTOIDS. Recently for AD, I wrote a short piece of admiration for the late Sinéad O'Connor. I focused on her dedication to The Holy Spirit, a force she would sometimes describe as “music itself.” O’Connor is one of my favorite artists, and ranks among my personal canon of musical saints, a prophet misunderstood in her time:
“It didn’t matter if O’Connor was offering post-punk, folk-rock, roots reggae, big band jazz, or electronic pop—she always maintained the stance of a protest singer, a role she viewed as spiritual in nature, a role more often than not put her at odds with an industry and culture unaccustomed to witnessing such bravery and solidarity.
O’Connor on The Arsenio Hall Show, 1991:
Just a few pages into her 2021 memoir Rememberings, O’Connor details a conversation she had with her grandparent’s piano when she a child, detailing the “sore ghosts” that lived trapped inside it, who can only be released if she softly touches the piano’s keys. This vivid scene functions as an origin story for O’Connor, who communicated with spirits as a spiritual adventurer and strident artist, unafraid to follow her innermost intuition, preferring alignment with the essential spirit of creativity and expression as she understands it over anything else. We will not see her like again.
Spock Thoughts
We’ve also been having, frankly, a knock-out run on the weekly Transmissions podcast: This week, I hosted record producer and musical archivist Andy Zax. Ostensibly we gathered to discuss the great new Mort Garson’s Journey to the Moon and Beyond (Sacred Bones), but we couldn't help but gab about a lot more: Leonard Nimoy, Judee Sill, unorganized record collections, and more. Another great talk: my chat with Gia Margaret about the intuitive roots of her Jagjaguwar debut Romantic Piano. And before that, we pulled the ripcord with Marc Ribot.
Here’s a fun Mort Garson/NASA archival audio edit I tossed together:
Meanwhile, on the July edition of Radio Free Aquarium Drunkard on Dublab, I put together a Bill Frisell Egg Radio Special, featuring one-hour of covers, live, and studio variations of that classic cut.
Midnight Music Review in the Attic
And over at WASTOIDS, we’ve been kicking it into high gear with all sorts of fun videos and podcasts, like Marc Masters and John Howard’s 7” single series The Spindle, and Salvador Cresta’s fantastic Space Ghost: Coast to Coast meets 120 Minutes Midnight Music Review in the Attic. The latest episode of the latter is a must-watch, featuring Pedrum Siadatian on psychedelic pop of Paint’s Loss For Words and The Allah-Las forthcoming Zuma 85.
Kreative Kontrol in the Afterlife
I should note that in recent months, I was a guest on Kreative Kontrol with Vish Khanna and This is Your Afterlife with Dave Maher, two very different podcasts that gave me a great amount of space to reflect on making music, podcasts, writing, life, death, metaphysics, and more. It’s such a thrill to be a guest on shows, I appreciate Vish and Dave for having me very much.
The Cadence of Lunar Time
It’s been nearly a year since I released my debut album under the JPW banner, Something Happening/Always Happening. One of the most important people in the making of that album was my friend Michael Krassner, who helped shape and guide it. A few years ago, Krazz and I were sitting at one of our favorite spots, Middle Eastern Bakery & Deli on 16th St., and he slid me an early version of Ancient Music, which was recently released in its full form by Jealous Butcher Records. It is, put simply, the record of a lifetime. I wrote about it and wanted to share my notes here:
Michael Krassner found himself in the desert. Though his long running instrumental collective Boxhead Ensemble began in Los Angeles and cut its teeth on the Chicago improv/art rock scene of the late ‘90s and 2000s, the forthcoming double album Ancient Music is rooted deeply in the Sonoran Desert, where Krassner lives the unassuming life of a restaurateur and has raised his family. In its arid washes of sound and dirt under foot sonic surrealism—reminiscent of Brian Eno, Roger Eno, and Daniel Lanois’s Apollos: Atmospheres and Soundtracks, William Basinski disintegrating a Morricone score, or even the sand dune new age of Kevin Braheny Fortune, Michael Stearns, and Steve Roach’s Desert Solitaire—you hear the sound of growth at its own, natural pace. Slowly assembled over the course of more than 20 years, it’s a defining statement from the Boxhead collective, overseen by an artisan craftsmen who has carefully burnished its sounds down to the geologic essentials.
“The early days reflected the grittiness of that city,” Krassner says of Boxhead’s start, when characters like Jim O’Rourke, Jeff Parker, Edith Frost, Fred Lonberg-Holm, Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Doug McCombs (Brokeback, Tortoise), Scott Tuma (Sold American), Ken Vandermark, Dirty Three members Mick Turner and Jim White, and a pre-Wilco Glen Kotche (not to mention Mr. Wilco himself, Jeff Tweedy) appeared on Krassner’s early soundtrack recordings for director Braden King and Laura Moya. But when Krassner decamped to the heart of Phoenix, Arizona, a metropolitan sprawl in the heart of the desert, where his music began to take on a different tone, informed by the luminous quality of Southwestern light he found out west. “There’s something in the light out here,” he says.
Working with longtime collaborators like Tim Rutili of Califone, Wil Hendricks, Jakob Koller, Robin Vining, Keith Kelly on woodwinds, Joshua Hill, and Laraine Kaizer-Viazovtsev, Krassner oversaw sessions between 2001-2021 in Los Angeles and Finland, but primarily worked on the album in the 7-Track Shack, a small studio space behind his family’s home. Uniting chamber music stillness with rangy, naturalistic ambient country tones, Krassner and his collaborators reflect the vast unknowability of the desert, a place renowned for its beauty but also its deadliness.
Visions of You
Now that we’re kind of caught up, I’ll be back with more to share when that feels natural. On the way out, Brooklyn Vegan’s Bill Pearis rounded up some incredible Sinéad O'Connor duets and collaborations I can’t stop spinning, including this tranced-out psych pop drone:
A few records I’ve been taken with lately: The Clientele, I Am Not There Anymore; The Waterboys, A Pagan Place; The Electric Prunes, Release of an Oath