Feel Like Sunshine

Silver Jackson “Melodies and Bass”

I am reasonably certain that this is the first artist based in Alaska that I have featured on this site in its 13 year history. Alaska is one of those cultural dead zones where even if there’s cool arts stuff going on, it just never seems to make it out of there and into the culture. Silver Jackson’s music definitely sounds like something made in relative isolation – it’s very odd and distinct, and comes across as the sort of music a person works on obsessively alone over long stretches of time. It’s not entirely sui generis – I can hear traces of artists like Gonjasufi, cLOUDDEAD, and other forms of stoned, abstracted R&B in his tracks – but it’s certainly not ordinary, and it’s so off-center that even moments of straightforward melody are disorienting. “Melodies and Bass” is essentially an R&B song, but it sounds like it’s made of rattling, broken parts, and swinging on a busted hinge. But still, despite the roughness of it all, there’s a gentle grace at the core of it.

Buy it from Bandcamp.