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After releasing the remarkable Stardust in 2020, an imaginative album of otherworldly folk, jazz and pop, Luka Kuplowsky has been thoughtfully expanding the scope of his creativity. In 2022 he released the self-produced “meditation collection” Capturing The Evening Song, an album that pairs Kuplowsky’s mellow croon with sounds that recall the ambient works of Hiroshi Yoshimura and Inoyama Land. 2022 also heralded the announcement of a brand new project Ingredient, a collaborative avant-pop duo with Ian Daniel Kehoe that traverses the sounds of house, pop and dub. In his hometown of Toronto, Kuplowsky remains an active member of jazz and songwriting communities, regularly organizing and performing with the eclectic tribute group The Holy Oak Family Singers, as well as reinterpreting Zen Buddhist and Tang Dynasty poets with the improvisatory collective The Ryōkan Band (2023 is set to release a sprawling double LP from this project produced by Sandro Perri).
In the midst of this prolific creative output comes the funk mysticism of “The Spirits Are Busy”, a single of philosophical musings on spirituality set against the spaced-out sound of psychedelic tropicalia. The single reunites many of the collaborators from Stardust (Thom Gill on guitar, Felicity Williams on vocals, and Josh Cole on bass), and introduces Jason Bhattachyara on percussion.
LISTEN / SHARE “THE SPIRITS ARE BUSY” HERE
Kuplowsky says, “the song is a recognition of the unanswerable. It is an attunement to the spiritual worlds that intersect and illuminate our daily lives. The spirits are busy? Is that good? Bad? Are they busy with us? Busy elsewhere? Attending to the universal song? Bathing in the interstellar stream? Who knows, but they are certainly busy.
“Musically, it’s motown rhythm, garage jazz ala Blossom Dearie and that amorphous T.O sound of spaciousness and wonk.”
