LA Priest

Baby's Presents: LA Priest

+ Doors @ 6:30PM

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The story of Fase Luna, the third LA Priest album, begins with Sam Eastgate floating face down off Mexico’s east coast, with the sound of drums thudding in his ears. 

Variously known as Sam Dust, LA Priest and L.A. Priest, he has built a reputation as a subversive, unpredictable musician, consistently innovating over the course of his work with his now defunct breakout band Late Of The Pier, LA Priest and his cherished Soft Hair collaboration with Connan Mockasin. In the process, Sam has inspired a cult-like following, to whom his next move will always be a glorious mystery.

His last album, 2020’s GENE, was named after a modular drum machine that Sam designed using 150 electrical circuits he’d built himself. But if that record took his rhythmic analogue pop further towards Arthur Russell and Prince, its ocean-inspired follow-up Fase Luna strips things back to little more than Sam and his guitar, nine sunshine-streaked tracks that call to mind Haruomi Hosono and The Blue Nile’s later work. 

From the gently warped guitars on super-chilled opener “On”, through to the slow and tender closer “No More”, each song weaves and undulates into the next, creating an immersive whole. Recording in Mexico and Costa Rica, Sam was struck by the area’s mythical history and ancient connection to the ocean, drawing heavily on both to pack Fase Luna with stories of spirits and imaginations of life on the ocean bed. Lead single “It’s You” is a funked-up love song from the perspective of a character who falls hard for a mermaid and must choose between life on earth or his aquatic fantasy, while “No More” presents the tale’s conclusion, detailing what happens when love drives someone to the edge of sanity. Elsewhere, the mind-bending melodies and guitar lines on “Silent” tell a story of voices lost in time, while the anthemic “Star” is Sam’s expression of what it feels like to be a ghost. 

While making Fase Luna, Sam challenged himself to write more lyrics and sing more, presenting his vocals as another instrument, used to ensure each song knits into the next. Without a synthesiser in sight, this is the most organic LA Priest record yet. And with drums laid down by a local musician in Mexico as Sam hummed the melodies, the closest the record gets to modern technology of any kind is the translation tool he used to write the Spanish lyrics of far out “fairy story” “Sail On”. And, as ever with Sam Eastgate, the path to the music involved an intrepid journey.

This time, GENE provided the first stepping stone. When the world heard the record, requests to build drum machines began to hit Sam’s inbox from around the world, with one correspondent from Belize eventually inviting him over to work at their studio. And so, at the beginning of 2021, Sam upped sticks to swap the Welsh borders for central America, only to find upon arrival in Mexico that he would be unable to actually get into Belize due to travel restrictions. In that instant, what would become the third LA Priest album changed completely. Marooned by the beach in Puerto Morelos, Sam found inspiration from the sea.

“I just started swimming and snorkelling, which I’d never done, and that was it,” he explains. “I didn't need any more inspiration than that.”

And Sam paints a vivid picture of his time by the sea. “It’s this powerful thing that sometimes makes you feel quite small and in awe of nature,” he explains. “There's a mystical element to it, it was all a bit mystical, really! You’d have traditional Mayan dancers on the beach, so you’d be in the water swimming and hearing this loud drumming sound, it was really powerful in your chest.”

After a few weeks of gazing down at the ocean bed every day, Sam became perturbed by what he was seeing (“Sea monster-type things, some sharks and things like that”) and the warm glow faded. And, joined by a dog who’d followed him home from the beach one day, he travelled south into the Costa Rican jungle in a clapped out 4x4 to complete the bulk of the recording. A trip to visit friends led to an encounter with a group of people renting wooden cabins beneath the canopy of lush green.

“It was too good to be true, so beautiful that it kind of makes you sick,” he smiles. “It’s so far from a lot of people’s ordinary lives, I’ll have to have some dinner ladies sitting around smoking in front of a Costa Rican waterfall in the music videos, just to bring back the Englishness of it.”

One man there, Javier, a fellow lover of psychedelic and prog rock, would play a vital role in Fase Luna’s conception. Indeed, a photograph from his archive adorns the album’s sleeve. “I think he was just happy to find someone who was into these leftfield old things, we were listening to scary music from the ’60s and ’70s,” says Sam. “I was like, ‘This is exactly what I’m trying to do,’ so he just said, ‘You can record here if you want.’” 

And so the odyssey continued. Sam would spend the rest of the year there, rising early to walk his guitar and recording gear to his cabin and arriving drenched in sweat each time. He would leave before dark, warned against armed robbery and other dangers. All the while, monkeys roamed amidst the banana trees and the cicadas created an ambient din, which played havoc when it came to mixing (“It would have been nice to hear the treble, but I embraced it!” he says). As he worked, his kinship with the surroundings intensified, as did feelings of isolation and unease.

“It was a very strange feeling, like I’d gone into the afterlife,” he explains. “There was a sadness to being that close to perfection. You can’t keep it in your pocket or take it home with you, you don’t know what to do with it, you’re just trying to look at it and absorb it. I don’t know whether that’s necessarily a cause for sadness, but there is a strange feeling of, ‘Well what do I do now that I’ve reached this point?’”

Sam says the human quest to be at one with the beautiful environments we find is futile, but his time in Costa Rica made him realise that music offers the closest possible connection. “Music is just singing along with nature,” he says. “That’s what I wanted to do, listen to what’s beautiful and play a little tune back to the world.”

Part of his Costa Rican ritual involved heading to the same elevated clearing to greet the sea each day, as his hosts advised. “They said it was really bad for you if the sea is there and you don’t go and visit it every day,’ Sam says. “I felt like I had a duty to at least look at the sea and be there in my mind. It got me thinking about the idea of being drawn to the sea, like you have some kind of purpose there. I was trying to answer the question of what on earth I was doing staring at the sea.”

And it’s this quest for purpose that defines Fase Luna and the latest iteration of LA Priest. Raw and unfiltered, this record offers a one-way ticket to another world. “I want to give people a feeling that they’re free when they listen to it, it’s not bringing you back to reality, it’s escapism,” says Sam, who says he’ll carry on testing himself as his career continues. “I feel like every record is teaching me a little bit more, that’s why I want to do it a different way every time. I don’t get why people ever stop making records.”

Venue Information:

Baby's All Right
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Brooklyn, NY 11211
http://babysallright.com/

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