Today Sis and the Lower Wisdom has announced a new album, Saints and Aliens, out Jan. 9. It's the fourth album overall for Jenny Gillespie Mason, who previously recorded as just "Sis." She has also shared a new single, "Crocus Man" that was written on an airplane. One other track from the album was previously released as a stand-alone single, "Yoga Of The Soul's Release."
"On a long flight back from NYC to SF, I wrote this song on Ableton using some cut up samples from a past unused recording session. I think I was listening to "Ocean Man" by Ween a lot with my kids, which perhaps streamed into the title and the kind of lilting funky vibe. The subject was the friend I'd just visited--one of the most beautiful, funniest humans I know. I hadn't written a song of direct address in a while, and wanted to write a song about a friend, which I'd never really done, either. When I got home I added some Rhodes and clavinet, sang the vocals, and sent it to the brilliant Dougie Stu for further refinement and arrangement." -Jenny Gillespie Mason
Saints and Aliens by Sis and the Lower Wisdom celebrates the bliss and strangeness of lived life on a planet hanging out in space. What started as a series of solo homespun sonic experiments bloomed more fully in collaboration with a larger group of LA-based musicians, prompting the birth of the collective name the Lower Wisdom.
Taken from the Gnostic concept of divine wisdom falling from a higher sphere to the lower realms in order to experience itself in materiality, the name expresses how music can be a vessel for spirit to stumble, shimmer, and find form.
Culled from two years of singer/songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Jenny Gillespie Mason's writing and recording processes, then sharpening in collaboration with the producer and bassist Dougie Stu, the album begins with more direct, intimate songs such as "Crocus Man" and "Wolf Child," speaking to the pure magic of the saints and aliens among our beloveds. Midway through, the album drifts outward into widescreen meditations ("Yoga of the Soul's Release," "Luce") on the soul’s emergence from behind the veil of the outer self. The sound exists in a messy, luminous space between improvisational jazz and Mason's longtime love of catchy pop. Out 1/9/26 on Native Cat Recordings.
Press photo by Ginger Fierstein
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