Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon and S. Carey, along with rapper Astronautalis have formed a new band: Jason Feathers. The group will debut their first album, De Oro, digitally next week. CDs come out in September.
Officially, the members of Jason Feathers are rapper Creflo, drummer/piano-man Toothpick, singer/guitarist Ephasis, and a mysterious bassist. It’s unclear exactly why Vernon, Carey, and Astronautalis are using these pseudonyms, but regardless, this collaboration promises to be nothing less than amazing.
You can hear it in the short preview released on YouTube last week. The demo snippet sounds dark, haunting and more than a little creepy, with insect-like electronic background music, ethereal male vocals, and a resonating hum that pervades the entire 1:09 release. It’s chilling and tingling and sounds like a ghost-story. August 19 can’t come soon enough.
Jason Feathers appeared into the music world along with a ridiculous backstory, which you can find in its entirety on Pitchfork’s site.
Notably, the band is the result of “four seedy characters [that] happened to be in the right place at the right time: in the thickest of humidity one July evening, in a bar where Florida meets Alabama.” As one commenter called it, the haunted-southern aesthetic makes sense given this sort of prehistory. And who are these seedy characters? The press release is hardly short on description: “One evening Jason Feathers, a.k.a. Creflo, a red-chested god-bassed Southern rapper in a fancy white suit, found himself in an after-bar-impromptu-musical-round-up. There, he tangled with two flashily-clad cronies, one called Toothpick, a drummer-hype-piano-man all in one, and the other a heavily-seasoned guitar-crooning lost-cowboy that went by Ephasis. The house engineer that night, a white-haired man with ghostly features that the locals all called Opacity, captured all that went down. Later there was ________, who put it all together and played “bass” amongst sequenced plugs and wires.”
There’s no denying the strangeness and dubious quality of this biography, but whoever Jason Feathers is, from the little we’ve heard of De Oro so far, they’re some seedy southerners to watch.
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