Joe Westerlund Shares Sprawling Single “Kinshasa Yang” - New Album Elegies for the Drift Out February 24th via Psychic Hotline

“Kinshasa Yang”

Joe Westerlund

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Elegies for the Drift

Out 2/24 on
Pyschic Hotline

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North Carolina Percussionist Joe Westerlund Shares Sprawling Single “Kinshasa Yang”

New Album Elegies for the Drift Out February 24th via Psychic Hotline

Press Release

Today Joe Westerlund, an acclaimed North Carolina-based percussionist, composer and student of Milford Graves, who has collaborated with the likes of Sylvan Esso, Bon Iver, Califone, Megafaun, Gayngs, and more, has announced his sprawling new album, Elegies for the Drift, to be released February 24th via Psychic Hotline. Listen to the first offering from this record, “Kinshasa Yang,” HERE. Of today’s release, Westerlund explains:

“Kinshasa Yang began as a series of layered, interlocking patterns I recorded with acoustic drums and percussion in the months leading up to my travels. Upon returning from that swirling experience, I began to dub out the initial ideas with sudden mutes, filter sweeps, echoing delays and cassette-squashed phasing, not unlike how a club DJ might manipulate tracks in a live setting. This energetic stretch of time in the summer of 2021 marked a turning point in my creative process, as well as in my grieving process, which is somewhat inadvertently mirrored in the emotional arc of the record.”

Elegies is a collection of five instrumental remembrances for people, times, and chances Westerlund has lost. It keys on two of Westerlund’s musical lodestars: Akron/Family’s Miles Cooper Seaton and Milford Graves, the free jazz iconoclast who drew Westerlund to Vermont’s Bennington College before becoming his lifelong guide, until he died only a week before Seaton. The record also owes to Aaron Efird, the father of Westerlund’s longtime partner, Carson, who died after an extended illness in April 2022.  

The resulting record is an exquisite index of the inspiration these people collectively offered Westerlund. Unapologetically opinionated and aggressively charismatic, Seaton, Graves, and Efird all gave the perennially polite native Midwesterner more courage to be himself, the very kind of confidence he’d need to pour out his emotions for the audience of a public release. It is a wordless thank-you letter, a heartfelt transmission from a season of sadness. 

Just five months after Seaton and Graves died in February 2021, Westerlund visited Kinshasa, the bustling Congolese capital, to see his extended family and play with the legendary Kasai Allstars for an afternoon. “Carolina Yin” and “Kinshasa Yang” mine the tension between who we are and who we might be, moving from the former’s peaceful haze of mbiras and bells to the latter’s kinetic playground of balafons, cymbals, and electronics. These tandem works are testaments to slipping among seemingly oppositional frames of mind, to holding onto yourself while trying on something new, too. The latter half is available to listen to on all streaming platforms today; listen HERE.

The physical version of Elegies for the Drift will be released as an extremely limited-run of CDs, with each one featuring custom hand-painted jackets by Westerlund; it will be available in a handful of North Carolina retailers, in addition to via Westerlund’s Bandcamp.

MORE INFORMATION ABOUT ELEGIES FOR THE DRIFT:
Joe Westerlund was reluctant to record, shy about what he might just play. It was February 2022, and Westerlund had booked three days at Betty’s, the wooded studio haven of his occasional bandmates in Sylvan Esso. He had worked for a year on Elegies for the Drift, his second solo percussion album and a set of poignant pieces about a triumvirate of mentors who had recently died or were dying. 

But he had one last idea, one more remembrance for his confidant and collaborator, Akron/Family’s Miles Cooper Seaton, who had passed in a car crash exactly a year earlier. Westerlund queued up samples of Seaton speaking during a local performance, plus the sound of a hailstorm he’d recorded 15 minutes after receiving that awful news. Sitting there alone in the studio, save for audio engineer Alli Rogers, he wondered exactly what he was doing, or if he could be so vulnerable around a near-stranger he’d hired for help. Finally, he closed his eyes, thought about what Seaton would do in such a situation, and played his feelings. The result— “The Circle,” seven minutes of wobbly bells and warped voices, coalescing into the kind of life-affirming astral drone that would make The Necks proud—is one of the most powerful and absorbing tributes to another human you will ever hear.

As its name suggests, Elegies for the Drift is indeed a collection of five instrumental remembrances for people, times, and chances Westerlund has lost. It keys on two of Westerlund’s musical lodestars: Seaton and Milford Graves, the free jazz iconoclast who drew the young drummer to Vermont’s Bennington College before becoming his lifelong guide until he died only a week before Seaton. It also owes to Aaron Efird, the father of Westerlund’s longtime partner, Carson, who died after an extended illness in April 2022. 

Perhaps more important, though, Elegies is an exquisite index of the inspiration these people collectively offered Westerlund. Unapologetically opinionated and aggressively charismatic, Seaton, Graves, and Efird all gave the perennially polite native Midwesterner more courage to be himself, the very kind of confidence he’d need to pour out his emotions for the audience of an audio engineer. It is a wordless thank-you letter, a heartfelt transmission from a season of sadness. 

It is almost shockingly easy to find points of inspiration in our times of ceaseless content churn. Turn on a podcast or sample from an infinite scroll of documentaries or television streams—we are all looking to find the redemption in someone else’s saga, to mine it like a precious stone for our own fuel. But it is endlessly harder to actually do something with such inspiration, to internalize the insights of someone else’s toil, trouble, and occasional triumph enough to make you a better thinker, artist, or person. 

Elegies for the Drift is proof that it can happen. Yes, three of the most vibrant, vital, and often brash people Westerlund ever met are now gone. But their sparks remain clear inside these five wonders, whether in the playfully gilded rhythms of “Prelude to Quietude” or the exquisite and inquisitive expanse of “The Circle.” You hear Westerlund’s heroes, trace their guiding light. Westerlund has never sounded so confident or so searching, so sure of what he wants to say about three people who inspired him to say anything at all. Elegies for the Drift, in the end, is exactly what we can do with grief—make something beautiful, so we can keep going ourselves. 


ABOUT JOE WESTERLUND:
Joe Westerlund is a drummer familiar from many possible contexts. For a decade, he served as the dynamic backbone of Megafaun, the North Carolina trio of sophisticated songwriting and winning charisma that he co-founded. As Grandma Sparrow, Westerlund constructed fantastical song cycles about an imagined town, a place where swooping strings and sudden singalongs told the stories of characters you needed to be real. Under his own name, Westerlund—a longtime student of Milford Graves—has emerged as an intuitive improviser, committed to scoring deep yogic practice. He has recently acted as the pulse beneath the plaintive Americana of Watchhouse (fka Mandolin Orange) and Daughter of Swords, as the anchor for the folk abstraction of Califone; he has also added incisive percussion to a big-band version of Sylvan Esso and buoyed the svelte stoner soul of Gayngs, old friends from his Wisconsin childhood.

ABOUT PSYCHIC HOTLINE:
Psychic Hotline is an artist-run recording company based in Durham, NC, founded by Amelia Meath & Nick Sanborn of Sylvan Esso alongside their longtime manager, Martin Anderson. Working with Secretly Distribution and Kris Chen (Nonesuch, XL, Domino), the company seeks to create new works and reissue classic albums from their ever-expanding musical community. Led by the artist perspective, Psychic Hotline’s aim is to make the process of creating and releasing albums accessible to those who make them -reflected in radically artist-forward dealmaking, creative support, and innovative marketing approaches.