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.

I should preface this by saying, I’ve been finishing up a nine-song solo album that I’ve been working on for a few months now. There are a few loose ends to tie up, but for the most part, it’s done. Or it was.

Oxygen Masks was ready to go

Last night completely by chance I saw Jean-Luc Godard’s 1987 film, King Lear. I had no clue what was in store for me. I won’t really try to describe the experience, partly because I can’t yet. But it was just one of those unexpected experiences with art that completely caught me off-guard.

About halfway through the film, which was just as much a pleasure to listen to as it was to watch, this album I’ve been working on sprang to mind and I thought, I need to deconstruct my process for making music and start this entire project over. And so I have.

To me, this is the function of great art. Great art can be subjective, as well—for me, it’s a Godard film, but for someone else it could be a Picasso painting or a Bad Religion song. Whatever it is, something about it rewires the way you think about things, about yourself, about the world. It makes you approach life differently.

Watching this film, I realized I’d been approaching music—in what I play, how I play it, how I write and record it—everything—in a way that I don’t really identify with anymore. It’s comfortable and unfamiliar at the same time. I haven’t been pushing myself, and the results are generally good enough—and what I realized last night, sitting in this theater, was that good enough is actually not that at all.

So I am starting from square one, unsure of how to move forward or what I’ll end up producing, but I know it just can’t be what I was going for. I hope it will be weird.

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.

Westmoreland and James M Wood

Beverly and Alvarado

Slow Rose bookended a wild, curated 26-hour show over the weekend at 2220 Arts and Archives and I only saw about seven hours of it and judging from what I did see, I missed out on not being there for the other 19. Nevertheless, a couple photos from driving around before and after.