Westerman

Somewhere on the road in Minnesota, Will Westerman saw something that shouldn’t exist. “There was a break in a thunderstorm and sun shining through it,” he recalls with measured awe. “It seemed impossible.” A sunshower is a peculiar phenomenon, captivating people long enough for there to be an array of folkloric associations with the surreal beauty of its implausible contrast. From Asia to Africa, it’s been described as a “wedding” for a trickster animal — a fox, a monkey, a jackal. Suddenly, Westerman had a name for the music he was working on, material as otherworldly as the strange games our sun plays on us. For his third album, A Jackal’s Wedding, Marta Salogni and Westerman holed up for five weeks at the Old Carpet Factory, a 17th century mansion converted into an arts space and studio, on the Greek island of Hydra. It became a document of leaving and arriving, ongoing transformation, the liminal spaces between shadows and the lights that cast them. Rarely a confessional writer, he instead drew upon his unfamiliar surroundings to work his way into A Jackal’s Wedding’s central concept: We can never really hit pause on real life, and things never get so predictable or stable as we’d like to think. Instead, it is all flux, forever punctuated by tiny moments of stillness, awe, harmony. A Jackal’s Wedding is out now on Partisan.