Westerman

Somewhere on the road in Minnesota, Will Westerman saw something that shouldn’t exist.“There was a break in a thunderstorm and sun shining through it,”he recalls with measuredawe.“It seemed impossible.”A sunshower is a peculiar phenomenon, captivatingpeople longenough for there to be an array of folkloric associations with the surreal beauty of itsimplausible contrast. From Asia to Africa, it’s been described as a“wedding”for a tricksteranimal—a fox, a monkey, a jackal. Suddenly, Westerman hada name for the music he wasworking on, material as otherworldly as the strange games our sun plays on us.

 

For his third album,A Jackal’s Wedding, Marta Salogni and Westerman holed up for five weeksat the Old Carpet Factory, a 17th century mansion converted into an arts space and studio, onthe Greek island of Hydra. It became a document of leaving and arriving, ongoingtransformation, the liminal spaces between shadows and the lights that cast them. Rarely aconfessional writer, he instead drew upon his unfamiliar surroundings to work his way intoAJackal’s Wedding’s central concept: We can never really hit pause on real life, and things neverget so predictable or stable as we’d like to think. Instead, it is all flux, forever punctuated by tinymoments of stillness, awe, harmony.