BEFORE CALAMITY

On Before Calamity, artist Joseph Sant explores encounters with loss -- avoiding loss, being bombarded by the threat of it, cherishing what we have before it arrives, taking its blows when it does, and in its aftermath, searching for salvage.

This is music that has been focused by looming catastrophe. It arises out of a moment where the stakes of our hold on love are higher than ever amid threats to our selves, our communities, human dignity, and hope for the future. Ceaseless provocations against these things come to dominate our lives. We can defy these forces or succumb to fatalism, but either way, the gravity of threatened loss saps our energy away from other sources of meaning and rules out other aspirations for how we might live.

In each of these songs there is desperation to earn a reprieve from the vortex of loss that is the organizing principle of our times: what if a calamitous moon did not hang over us? What kinds of better lives could we imagine for ourselves?

Joseph was joined by a number of other Brooklyn musicians who contributed to the project, including producer Gabe Galvin, Kyp Malone (TV on the Radio), and multi-instrumentalists Stirling Krusing and Tyler Graham.

This is a special set of songs for Sant and this group of musicians, because they are the last that they worked on together with their friend, Stirling Krusing, before he passed away.

Stirling Krusing contributed lap steel and pedal steel compositions that he prepared for the record. Krusing has been known in Brooklyn music circles for refashioning these classic country western instruments to generate gorgeous, cosmic pop textures, full of yearnful riffs and harmonic chimes. But while work on Before Calamity was underway, he became gravely ill with a sudden cancer diagnosis. After finishing most of the EP with Sant, Krusing lost his ability to hold a guitar pick, then to play music altogether, and then his ability to speak.

Though physically weakened by treatment and unable to verbally communicate, his mind and his ears remained sharp enough that he insisted on joining Galvin, his lifelong friend, at Four Foot Studios in Brooklyn, to help complete mixes of Before Calamity before he passed away at the end of 2018.

While Sant did not set out to make a record about losing a friend — the songs were written months earlier — it has become imperative for him to lift up Krusing’s memory and his artistic voice with this release. To Sant, this EP feels to him as if a microphone were running on some of the last conversations he and Galvin had with their friend.

JOSEPH SANT

Joseph Sant is a musician living in Brooklyn, NY, hailing originally from Seattle, WA. As a songwriter he connects the intimate to larger social currents, prophesying love against the backdrop of doom. He composes with lush, mountainous textures, angular shapes, the noise of braking train cars, and the encroaching sea. His first EP, Sea White Salt, self-released in 2016, earned a raft of positive reviews by underground music writers.

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