Twenty years ago, Joe Westerlund moved to North Carolina with DeYarmond Edison, the pre–Bon Iver project with Justin Vernon that evolved into Megafaun. Then he became one of the region's most prized drummers, playing with prominent acts like Mount Moriah, Jake Xerxes Fussell, and Sylvan Esso. But while he was dissolving his creeping, cellular sense of time in song-forward ensembles, there was an experimental composer waiting to come out. The first rip in the chrysalis set loose Grandma Sparrow, a capering performance-art alter ego that fused shades of Syd Barrett and Frank Zappa in psychedelic children’s music. Audacious and eccentric, it was an id explosion that served to propel Westerlund downstage, clearing the decks for a more grounded emergence to come.
In 2020, he released Reveries in the Rift, his debut solo album of meditative polyrhythms lathered with bells and gongs. In 2023, Elegies for the Drift shaped the improvisations into more complete compositions, centered on Westerlund’s study of the thumb piano in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, paying tribute to lost friends and mentors such as Milford Graves, the legendary free jazz drummer who taught him at Bennington College. Now Curiosities From the Shift builds upon that strong foundation, continuing a trajectory in which each album has been distinct from and better than the last. Westerlund has found a framework where his patient excavation process thrives, and I’m eagerly anticipating Hits From the Spliff in a year or two.
The “shift” is Westerlund’s embrace of the clave, the syncopated pattern that gives Afro-Cuban styles like salsa and rumba their globally recognized feel. It would be wrong to claim that he has innovated on the clave after a few years of study; the vanguard of its tradition safely lies with the likes of Dafnis Prieto, Miguel Zenón, and Danilo Pérez. But he soulfully inhabits it as a pure shape: two measures in 4/4 time and five accents unevenly divided between them, a strict grammar that gives rise to an illusion of thrilling unsettledness. You can get anywhere from there, and Westerlund does, pumping up the jams without sacrificing finesse. The record’s thrumming tensile surface is trippily detailed, the revolving clave scattering rays and reflections in every stereo direction.
After recording alone at Sylvan Esso’s studio, Westerlund had friends like Califone’s Tim Rutili, saxophonist Sam Gendel, and violinist Libby Rodenbough make their marks, drawing out the songfulness of his pitched percussion and electronic washes—his kaleidoscopic mills of hand drums, shakers, metallophones, thumb pianos, flutes, field recordings, and so on. To call it a percussion album probably gives the wrong idea of austerity and intensity, when the music is really driven by its transparent density and uncanny efflorescence of textures and colors. It’s vivid and exciting in the manner of techno, though dancing to it would be a path to insanity, and it’s beautiful and subtle in the manner of concert music without taking itself quite so seriously.
For all of his evident technical ability, Westerlund's music seems most concerned with vibe and feel, and each track on Curiosities gives us a different way to perceive meaning in motion. “Nu Male Uno” is moist-eyed like Animal Collective, draping a swaying theme over a sashaying ant-line of little pulses. “Peebles ’n’ Stones” is an array of seemingly disparate parts—unwinding clockwork, essayistic constructions of mixed percussion, glassily shattering piano phrases—inextricably linked like falling dominos. “Can Tangle” distills a knack for coating sweet, tiny songs in glittering scales of rhythmic and timbral elaboration.
There are still many surprises to come—the dubby noir of “Persurverance,” the computerized scramble and galumph of “Furahai,” the perfumed Italo splashes of “Midpoint,” and the mighty churn of “Elegy (for OLAibi),” which begins in sinuous reverie and ends in rapture. Throughout his work, Westerlund makes beats feel less like unilateral lines and more like vast webs vibrating with sympathetic reactions—percussion as ecosystem, not the bulldozer plowing through it. This approach, rigorous yet flexible and fluid, has a natural synergy with the clave on Curiosities From the Shift. Though clearly born out of strenuous study and effort, it’s an easy and captivating listen, which is the essence of his generous, endlessly generative approach to music.
