The first time the band that became LuMiSong ever played together was during the Great Lockdown of July 2020. The others wore masks while I stood twenty feet away with the door behind me open to a Gowanus side-street. I hadn’t shared a sound or negotiated an eighth-note with anybody for months and the experience overwhelmed me with emotion. (The most basic facts of collective music-making are the most profound.) We all brought in music to that session and to the many that followed. Matt and Santi are both prolific composers, and I had (still have) a pretty enormous backlog of unrecorded compositions. It was a thrill to hear the pieces take on dimension and color and the personality-traits of my fabulous friends, great comrade musicians getting together just for the music—all calendars as blanked-out and empty as the streets. I knew this would be the band and the music for my next record, whenever that would be...
The following Summer, confinement had loosened its grip enough for us to play a live-streamed gig at Barbès in Brooklyn before a tiny in-person audience. We went into the studio the next day and recorded nine pieces. What emerged from listening to the roughs over the ensuing months was a record I hadn’t expected to make. I focused on four of the pieces and over the following year combined takes, overdubbed like crazy and mixed each piece as if it was its own record, its own movie. The guys had played with so much fire and accuracy and groove, the basic tracks kept on blossoming through my fever dreams.
Music can be many things at different times, here it is an art of collage and folding, sound upon sound, pulse against pulse, a gathering of LuMinous intensities of Song. Or, a mosaic: each tile—psychedelic camel pop, electro-Lacy, alien-Glam, dabke Mingus, urban Webern— a palimpsest of worlds, memories and artifacts arranged palindromically to tell of the journey from Apartment #63 Yi king hibernation to Spring breaking through the cracks of Hood Park in Washington Heights with the GWB in hallucinatory nearness, and back again to a Sahara of the Imagination with ghost bands and doppelgangers lurking in the texture, something unseen, something unheard…
