Jeffrey East

In September of 2024 Jeffrey Foucault will release THE UNIVERSAL FIRE (Fluff & Gravy, 9/6/24), his first album of entirely new material since 2018. A series of high-voltage performances cut live in one room, the album is both a working wake – Foucault lost his best friend and drummer Billy Conway, to cancer in 2021 – and a meditation on the nature of beauty, artifact, and loss. Augmenting Foucault's all-star band with members of Calexico and Bon Iver (drummer John Convertino and producer/saxophonist Mike Lewis) THE UNIVERSAL FIRE sets Conway’s death against the massive 2008 fire at the Universal Studios lot in California that destroyed the master recordings of some of our bedrock American music, to interrogate ideas about mortality, legacy, meaning, and calling.

Jeffrey Alexander and his associated groups reach back to that magical Terrastock era of the '90s: booking fests and shows, sharing stages, studios and vans with the (should be) most venerated and celebrated of those more pure years: Tom Rapp, Ghost (Japan), Marissa Nadler, Bridget St. John, Flying Saucer Attack, and too many more to mention. Alexander has been a member of Jackie-O Motherfucker, The Iditarod, and Black Forest/Black Sea, among others.