With collaboration from an unexplainable presence known simply as “The Spirit.” Jesse James (they/them) creates viscerally emotional soundscapes in a maelstrom of electronic and acoustic drums, ambient synths, noise walls, classical guitar, and otherworldly samples, touching on a variety of genres from trip hop, cold wave, and ambient to folk, noise, and raw atmospheric black metal. Gloom.
Jesse James is an intensely DIY-focused writer, producer, vocalist, multi instrumentalist, and visual artist based in Brooklyn, NY.
TICKET LINKS:
7/26 Jersey City (The Black Pearl) – email jesseandthespirit@gmail.com for location
8/8 Catskill, NY (Avalon Lounge) TICKETS
8/16 Albany, NY (The Rat Den)
8/24 Buffalo, NY (Hickory Urban Sanctuary) door only
8/29 Brooklyn, NY (Wonderville) TICKETS
9/14 Philadelphia, PA (Cambria House)
10/2 Boston, MA (Midway Cafe)
10/4 Portland, ME (The Apohadion Theater)
10/25 Philadelphia, PA (Cecil Skate Park)
10/26 Queens, NY (House show)
11/20 Brooklyn, NY (Gold Sounds) loading single release
11/30 Buffalo, NY (House show)
12/10 Brooklyn, NY (Hart Bar) OVAL visual album release
After playing in numerous Buffalo, NY-based bands, Jesse James (they/them) created Jesse & The Spirit in 2016 as an outlet for their maniacal outsider experimentation and a desire to create music that is completely unique and unlike anything else. The project has never ceased to evolve between each release, weaving entire genres of music like colors into a dark, melancholic, imaginative, and apocalyptic tapestry of electronic and acoustic sounds. Increasingly literary, the project has created whole worlds of fiction and even branched into multimedia art pieces later on. From its inception, the project has strongly fastened to an intensely D.I.Y. approach, with Jesse not only, writing, performing, recording, producing, mixing and mastering everything but also creating their own music videos and visual art and self managing and booking. That said, “D.I.Y.” can be a bit of an ironic term given the project’s nature…
From 2015-2017, Jesse James lived at and co-ran a tiny house venue in Buffalo, NY with Kay Stuitje of Garden Closet, called “Little Baltimore,” a place that soon began to feel like it existed outside our own dimension, bringing in some of the best house shows the city had seen in a long time, graced by touring acts and local favorites alike. At the time, the two were hyper focused on the then-buzzing shoegaze/post-rock monolith Tomoreaux. It was in this house venue that those close began to feel a sort of otherworldly presence. Enter The Spirit.
During the implosion of Tomoreaux, Jesse James first started exploring hypnotic states, subconscious writing, and randomized processes making music. All the while, a presence was felt standing behind and above Jesse, as if to collaborate or supervise. Given the collaborative feeling of this album and its mystery and darkness, it only made sense for the project to include both parties in the name, the beginning of the artistic relationship between Jesse James and The Spirit of Little Baltimore. The first three albums tell a tale of what some may call “individuation,” “shadow work,” or “self-actualization,” detailing the Spirit’s first contact in the debut self-titled album, Jesse’s fleeing from it in the noisy, psychedelic electronica of 2018’s “When The Spirit caught up, I laid face-down in the crossroad, clutching the ground with every ounce of strength I could find,” and the integration of The Spirit in 2018’s gothic avant-folk album, “Clairvoyance.”
Following the integration of The Spirit and the first trilogy’s intense introspection, Jesse & The Spirit looked outward and saw a vision of a climate and Capital-induced apocalypse. Turning toward societal and political themes, Jesse & The Spirit began writing the immersive multimedia project “Peculiar Living,” which took about three years to complete. Musically, the album explored a vast array of sounds and the project continued to evolve, each track marking new musical territory, from the looped vocal chant of the album’s title track, to the noisy spoken prose post-industrialism of “Sulfuric Hellscape,” to the pummeling psychedelic electronic post punk of “Anthropocene.” With help from the Upstate, NY experimental label Astralands, the album was released in 2021 and included a 136-page novella, a highly ambitious found-document telling of the investigative journey of an eccentric journalist named P. Fermi into a local billionaire and his company’s outlandish carbon emissions. Fermi’s scrutiny leads him to the inner workings of the Jupiter Club, “the city’s finest private club,” where his exploration becomes strange, insidious, and psychedelic. “Peculiar Living” exists as a series of documents, with the narrative delivered through transcribed security cameras, Fermi’s own news articles and journals, phone conversations, and scientific research to create a mind-altering literary and auditory experience, exploring a vast array of themes including free will, climate change, wealth distribution, mental illness, and friendship.
In addition to these works, Jesse & The Spirit have also released four rarity collections: “Droplet Nuclei” (2020) exists as a series of ambient and psychedelic audio experiments made in the first days of COVID Lockdown, “Disoshi8” (2020) contains lofi comatose recordings made at the time of The Spirit’s first contact, “Songs of Daniel Johnston” (2019) was released shortly after Johnston’s passing, and “Outer Songs” (2023), available only on cassette, contains a collection of other genre-spanning acoustic covers.
Since the release of “Peculiar Living” in 2021, Jesse & The Spirit have been digging a new project from the Earth, a massive and sprawling, intensely personal diary called “Beauty,” which spans 15 tracks and 55 minutes. Spiritually a folk album, “Beauty” traverses trip-hop and IDM rich with organic and acoustic samples, intimate folk songs, and raw, atmospheric black metal. In the time it’s taken to perfect this album, another album has surfaced as well… Some of the tracks from the latter have been released (discovered), including “s a n d” and the alternate realities “a,” and “M.”
Jesse & The Spirit relocated to Brooklyn in 2023 and will be playing a handful of Northeastern tour dates this year. Plans to release these two new albums are in the works.
“Compellingly bleak and punishingly psychedelic” -buffaBlog
Peculiar Living Premiere – INTO FRUITION
“ANTHROPOCENE” single review -buffaBLOG
In addition to Jesse & The Spirit, Jesse James has written for and played in a number of other bands. For more Gloom check out:
THE NIAGARA RIVER (experimental liminal core / dreamcore collaboration with James Lotterer of auxcab) 2023-active
dolly sods – guitar and vocals (gloomy shoegaze) 2020-sort of active
TOMOREAUX – guitar, vocals, noise (implosive cult post-rock band) 2014-2017
HYMNS NOISE COLLECTIVE (2017-2019)
SUBURBS– keys, sampler, electronics (candyflip pop) 2016-2017
AWARD SHOW – drums (dreamy slow core) 2016-2021
ΔO – electronics (ambient collaboration with Andy Czuba (2019)
Jesse & The Spirit 