{"product_id":"joe-westerlund-curiosities-from-the-shift-vinyl","title":"Joe Westerlund - Curiosities From the Shift","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eDetails: \u003c\/strong\u003eDuring the last half-decade Joe Westerlund became engrossed in\r\nstudying the clave, the metric pattern that first defined so much\r\nAfro-Cuban and Latin music and then drifted into almost every corner\r\nof jazz and rock. What did it mean for an idea to be so flexible, for it\r\nto fit so many forms while retaining it's own essence? The result is\r\naleap into the unknown for Westerlund: Curiosities from the Shift, a\r\n12-track playground of endlessly interwoven beats and melodies,\r\nwhere Westerlund's clave enthusiasm collides with his textural\r\nexperimentalism, where his rhythmic symphony of one shakes hands\r\nwith friends decorating this space alongside him.\r\nThe three-piece suite that holds Curiosities' first half begins with the\r\njunkyard percussion and delightful bass splashes that frame \"Tem\"\r\nand ends with the surrealistic boom-bap of thumb pianos and\r\nshakers on \"Can Tangle.\" There is a hard-won joy to these numbers,\r\nas if Westerlund is delighting in real time in spotting a potential dead\r\nend but finding his own way forward, anyway. Those songs became\r\na kind of working roadmap for the terrain that Westerlund explores\r\nacross Curiosities, from the call-and-response glory of opener \"Nu\r\nMale Uno\" to the uncanny amorphousness of closer \"Felt Like\r\nFloating.\" All of these songs are defined by an identifiable rhythm,\r\nlike the loping strut at the center of \"Midpoint\" and the head-nodding\r\npulse that winds through \"Persurverance,\" winkingly misspelled to\r\nsuit his North Carolina-via-Wisconsin pronunciation. But those are\r\nspringboards for other textures, moods, and notions, like the New\r\nAge references-shimmering metallophones, chattering birds, retiring\r\nflutes-that circle through \"Midpoint\" or the dub-indebted delays and\r\ngamelan hymns that bubble up through \"Persurverance.\" This is\r\ndeeply multivalent music, each number's propulsive core\r\ncounterbalanced by a series of surprising choices. Bittersweetness\r\nand joy, grief and liberation, sighs and smiles: It all exists here,\r\ntangling toward infinity.\r\nIn the months after the initial sessions were done, Westerlund\r\nreached out to friends-Califone's Tim Rutilli, saxophonist Sam\r\nGendel, trumpeter Trever Hagen, and violinists Libby Rodenbough\r\nand Chris Jusell among them. These were his most thoroughly\r\ncomposed and precisely built works ever, but he wanted to hear\r\nwhat happened when his pals responded in real time. They delivered\r\ngrace, depth, and feeling, with their parts pulling back curtains on\r\nhidden recesses of rhythmic worlds.\r\nWesterlund readily admits he is surprised by the album's insistence\r\non groove and meter rather than drifting abstraction. Having lived\r\nand worked so long with bands, he assumed he was done\r\nfunctioning within basic meter. These 12 songs fuse so many of\r\nWesterlund's loves into pieces that are endlessly fascinating, using\r\nfamiliar elements to render his adventures into the unknown.\r\nPlayful but tender, wistful but wondrous, driven by beats but not\r\nbound by them, this is Westerlund's definitive statement so far, the\r\nsolo drummer record that opens wide to reveal a musical and\r\nemotional landscape richer than perhaps even he imagined he might\r\nfind.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Alliance Entertainment","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":54753062322514,"sku":"3850068358430","price":12.6,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1097\/1820\/8850\/files\/4449049-3430381_7aa66e64-9aac-44b6-b21d-dd8a3eb2bdc2.jpg?v=1789736867","url":"https:\/\/u31jvi-vq.myshopify.com\/products\/joe-westerlund-curiosities-from-the-shift-vinyl","provider":"My Store 2","version":"1.0","type":"link"}