{"product_id":"850068258420","title":"CURIOSITIES FROM THE SHIFT (2LP) | VINYL RECORD (LP)","description":"\u003cp\u003eJoe Westerlund, During the last half-decade Joe Westerlund became engrossed in  studying the clave, the metric pattern that first defined so much  Afro-Cuban and Latin music and then drifted into almost every corner  of jazz and rock. What did it mean for an idea to be so flexible, for it  to fit so many forms while retaining it's own essence? The result is  aleap into the unknown for Westerlund: Curiosities from the Shift, a  12-track playground of endlessly interwoven beats and melodies,  where Westerlund's clave enthusiasm collides with his textural  experimentalism, where his rhythmic symphony of one shakes hands  with friends decorating this space alongside him.  The three-piece suite that holds Curiosities' first half begins with the  junkyard percussion and delightful bass splashes that frame \"Tem\"  and ends with the surrealistic boom-bap of thumb pianos and  shakers on \"Can Tangle.\" There is a hard-won joy to these numbers,  as if Westerlund is delighting in real time in spotting a potential dead  end but finding his own way forward, anyway. Those songs became  a kind of working roadmap for the terrain that Westerlund explores  across Curiosities, from the call-and-response glory of opener \"Nu  Male Uno\" to the uncanny amorphousness of closer \"Felt Like  Floating.\" All of these songs are defined by an identifiable rhythm,  like the loping strut at the center of \"Midpoint\" and the head-nodding  pulse that winds through \"Persurverance,\" winkingly misspelled to  suit his North Carolina-via-Wisconsin pronunciation. But those are  springboards for other textures, moods, and notions, like the New  Age references-shimmering metallophones, chattering birds, retiring  flutes-that circle through \"Midpoint\" or the dub-indebted delays and  gamelan hymns that bubble up through \"Persurverance.\" This is  deeply multivalent music, each number's propulsive core  counterbalanced by a series of surprising choices. Bittersweetness  and joy, grief and liberation, sighs and smiles: It all exists here,  tangling toward infinity.  In the months after the initial sessions were done, Westerlund  reached out to friends-Califone's Tim Rutilli, saxophonist Sam  Gendel, trumpeter Trever Hagen, and violinists Libby Rodenbough  and Chris Jusell among them. These were his most thoroughly  composed and precisely built works ever, but he wanted to hear  what happened when his pals responded in real time. They delivered  grace, depth, and feeling, with their parts pulling back curtains on  hidden recesses of rhythmic worlds.  Westerlund readily admits he is surprised by the album's insistence  on groove and meter rather than drifting abstraction. Having lived  and worked so long with bands, he assumed he was done  functioning within basic meter. These 12 songs fuse so many of  Westerlund's loves into pieces that are endlessly fascinating, using  familiar elements to render his adventures into the unknown.  Playful but tender, wistful but wondrous, driven by beats but not  bound by them, this is Westerlund's definitive statement so far, the  solo drummer record that opens wide to reveal a musical and  emotional landscape richer than perhaps even he imagined he might  find.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WESTERLUND,JOE","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":48242099978485,"sku":"850068258420","price":28.83,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0681\/9325\/5669\/files\/0850068258420.jpg?v=1780889047","url":"https:\/\/thevinylvista.com\/products\/850068258420","provider":"Vinyl Vista","version":"1.0","type":"link"}