Pulp

Los Angeles-based experimental jazz collective High Pulp release their new album Days In The Desert. The titular desert is both literal and metaphorical: it's the Mojave Desert that the band powers through on their many DIY tours around the country, and the band's founder / drummer Bobby Granfelt perceives the desert as "a spiritual quest" as well. Amid the trials of our present moment, you must look within, relying solely on your own instincts to keep moving forward. "You're in the desert and it's a long, lonesome process and a lot of times you have to check yourself to ask 'Is this right? Is this good? Is it too out?'" he says.

"We're a bunch of outsiders who refused to be kept out," says High Pulp drummer Bobby Granfelt. "We've never had an academic approach to jazz-most of us grew up playing in DIY bands-so it was the rawness and the energy and the absolute freedom of the music that called to us in the first place." Indeed, there's something defiant, something utterly liberating about High Pulp's remarkable ANTI- Records debut, Pursuit of Ends. Drawing on punk rock, shoegaze, hip-hop, and electronic music, the band's brand of experimental jazz is both vintage and futuristic all at once, hinting at times to everything from Miles Davis and Duke Ellington to Aphex Twin and My Bloody Valentine.