Today Sis and the Lower Wisdom shares the fourth and final single from the forthcoming album, Saints and Aliens, out Jan. 9 on their own Native Cat label. It's the fourth album overall for Jenny Gillespie Mason, who previously recorded as just "Sis."
STREAM / SHARE: "Big Bend (Oh Jai Ma)"
"This song originally started as a long stream-of-consciousness poem written in a cabin on a river at night, in a small silver notebook I bought in Paris, with the word "Merci" on the front, that was helping me generate a lot of writing for a few months (was it the color? The origin? The word "Merci"?) I was with a group of people staying for the weekend in Mendocino county, but feeling a bit disoriented about my life at the time. Yet the moments I spent in the river felt so healing and real, and took me deeply into the bliss of being on Earth. I tried to bring both those states together in this song which I wrote first on the piano, then added vocals and various elements, then finally sent 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. Saints and Aliens is out 1/9/26 on Native Cat Recordings.
Press photos by Ginger Fierstein
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