After a rather brutal August into September heat wave, Los Angeles is finally settling into normal weather for this time of year. I look at my portable AC with hesitation—I feel like putting it away for the winter is tempting fate that we’ll get hit with another week of 90 degree lunacy. The beach is only 10 miles away but it takes 45 minutes to get there. Sometimes living in this city just feels absurd.

One of the difficulties with sobriety is that addicts are obsessive and tend to replace their habit with another, arguably less destructive, one. For me it’s been TV and movies. I feel less bad about the latter, but watching too much television feels gross. I know how bad it is for the mind, I’ve read enough media theory. It’s a problem that I’m trying to use music and reading to beat, but I consider it just as bad as drinking.

So here’s a list of stuff I’ve been listening to on a lazy Saturday afternoon:

Wilshire Kingsley

Those Who Walk Away, Afterlife Requiem
Kind of drone, kind of melodic; this is one you just kind of get lost in. I’ll put it on while working and parts will just come out and grab my attention out of nowhere.

Songs: Ohia, The Lioness
Totally slept on this for years, even though I love Didn’t it Rain. Just sad songs and beautiful guitar work from the late, great Jason Molina.

Gillian Welch, Time (The Revelator)
Possibly the best singer-songwriter album of the 21st century. Though it was written about Napster, “Everything is Free” is more meaningful than ever. Not a second of this is less than perfect.

Tim Hecker, Dropped Pianos
Different than most of Hecker’s more intense and varied work, this is short and sweet piano and organ music that keeps a pretty morose but enchanting experience.

The National, Rome (Full Concert)
This is half-full of songs I really didn’t like on their Frankenstein album that are completely different when played live. I just wish they’d played “Slow Show.”

Charli XCX, Wuthering Heights
I kind of disdain Charli’s cultural presence in general, but it’s hard to deny this record is just banger after banger. Just a monster of a pop album that will probably be my favorite of the year.

Radwan Ghazi Moumneh & Frédéric D. Oberland, Eternal Life No End
Excellent worldly music from this Middle Eastern duo that fuses a lot of traditional sounds from that part of the world with driving, electronic-inspired percussion.

Jason Isbell, Foxes In The Snow
I have been kind of mixed on his work since Southeastern, but this acoustic album about a breakup and falling in love with someone new is full of what it means to endure the extremes in relationships.

HEART Trio tonight at Zebulon

Saw the HEART Trio of William Parker, Cooper-Moore, and Hamid Drake tonight and it’s one of those performances that can’t be put into words. At one point Cooper brought out what looked like a two-by-four with a string lined between two blocks of wood and hit a bass tone so deep that it shook us in the front row. I mean the guy was playing hand-made, one-of-a-kind instruments that looked like they’d been assembled from things found on the side of the road (and some of them were), but damn if these guys couldn’t play.

The show wasn’t sold out, so that means under 300 people in a city of eight million saw this incredible performance. Which is fine, different strokes for different folks. But it’s such a cool thing to live in a place where on any given night I can go to a club and sit in the front row as some jazz legends blow my fucking hair back with some improvisational music that has no counter.

After the show ended the guys talked about the instruments they played and how they related to the history of music and really brought their performance full circle into shifting from hearing those relationships in sound to comprehending them through language. This was music that seemed to transcend the bullshit of the world and tap into something pure. Absolutely wonderful.

Tonight I got to see the Los Angeles premiere of Sarah Davachi playing The Will of Tongues in full at the First Congregational Church. It was mesmerizing, breathtaking, everything. It would lull me into a trance and then shock me out of it as the organ would go from a harmonized hum to an oscillating assault in a way that was a slow build but felt sudden. Really great stuff.

What I love about a show like this—beyond just the music—is that it’s an opportunity to enjoy something I otherwise probably wouldn’t in its purest form. There are any number of reasons I probably won’t sit down in my apartment and listen to a 90-minute organ work. For one, organs are best experienced in a hall (or church), not through shitty Bluetooth speakers. For two, the experience just feels right when you’re sitting in a silent pew and not a ratty couch as cars drive by.

But really, it’s just that organ music isn’t my thing most of the time. I would never find myself as invested as this work deserves outside of this experience seeing it live.

The rear organ at First Congregational

The dichotomy of live music against recorded music has been an ongoing conversation in my head for some time now. Live music feels like it should always be of the moment. Even if an act is playing composed works, it’s nice to experience deviations that might fit the mood of the room or night—yet I’ve really been a fan of the idea lately that all live music should be borderline improvised, while all recorded music should be meticulously composed and edited.

In a live setting, it feels conceptually appropriate to play something that only exists in that moment, for the people who are there to hear it. It transcends sound and becomes a component of connecting humans through place and time. Yet on record, music should be timeless and therefore crafted and refined diligently until something that can be listened to over and over is produced.

Tonight, I couldn’t tell you one way or another what was unique to the evening. While the pieces were composed, the organ was unique to the church and who knows how that might affect things. She certainly played with a ton of heart and some of the sounds that were produced had me paralyzed in awe. Throughout it I kept returning to some of these ideas about music, stuff that’s been on my mind throughout the making of the new ad lucem releases as well as a new solo album I’m working on now. It’s always welcome to experience something new and have it really charge how I think about something that’s been on my mind for a while.

New Views (Hoover Street)

Sometimes I think poetry will be the only art form that resonates from this era, the only thing that lasts. When you have too much of something, it becomes less valuable—and right now, even if we were to exclude all the AI filling the internet with slop, the mere technology jump we’ve had over the last 30 years has created an excess of available art. When art was regional, restricted by geography and analog methods of reproduction, sharing it was an experience in and of itself that became an integral part of culture.

Now with billions of interconnected screens, experiencing something new, and possibly profound, isn’t so much a desire, opportunity, or possibility—but an expectation. (Even worse is that experience is now integrated directly into the mechanics of capitalism.) The part of us, as humans, that can be affected by the inspiration of another person (and therefore building a sense of connection at a deep, spiritual level) is being bulldozed by a grotesque combination of algorithms and advertisements.

Thanks Metro (Wilshire / Vermont)

Thus, I think poetry probably matters most in this moment. The best poets are able to connect the dots of the human experience emotionally and physically with both the observable and ethereal aspects of reality that I don’t think any machine could ever reproduce. The one thing humanity will always have advantage of over any coded invention is a soul, and though all art forms can represent that depth of feeling alive, the best poems can touch the surface of what it means to be human, as opposed to what it feels like.

(Maybe I’ve just been putting off watching that Mary Oliver documentary for too long, a mistake I’ll rectify this week.)

It doesn’t have to be
the blue iris, it could be
weeds in a vacant lot, or a few
small stones; just
pay attention, then patch

a few words together and don’t try
to make them elaborate, this isn’t
a contest but the doorway

into thanks, and a silence in which
another voice may speak.

—Mary Oliver, “Praying”

on behalf of a ghost cover art

The first of a few sound-related projects I’ll be associated with this fall, the new ad lucem ‘single,’ on behalf of a ghost (two tracks, but each are over ten minutes long) we’re releasing ahead of a new full-length is out now. This is lengthy, spatial music that flows between textural patterns and gain stages.