Jas Walton - Face the Facts: Words by Alan Watts (10-inch EP)
Jas Walton - Face the Facts: Words by Alan Watts (10-inch EP)
Feat. a reverse-board jacket + an eight-page booklet
Includes a download card
Limited run of 1000
Available May 19 and in stores worldwide May 26
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music, or Bandcamp, or preview the album 👇
ALAN WATTS IS ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT INTERPRETERS OF EASTERN PHILOSOPHY FOR HIS TIME AND OURS.
If he were alive today he’d probably subvert social media in the same way he helped to reinvent western culture in his own time. One day, his complete audio recordings will be obligatory for anyone coming of age in the new age. His books and recordings are a treasured artifact of his pervasive effect on our times and a magnet for all those that nearly know of him and dearly need to. His words are as relevant now as they were then.
THIS YEAR, WATTS TURNS 100. WE CELEBRATE HIS CENTENNIAL WITH FACE THE FACTS, A FOUR-TRACK EP THAT TAKES THE RECORDINGS OF WATTS’S EARLY SEMINAR SESSIONS AND SETS THEM IN TIME TO ORIGINAL MUSIC.
Alan’s wit and wisdom were first broadcast on radio stations in the Bay Area in the late ‘50s and soon spread across America through public talks, tape recordings, books and on screen. On his portable tape deck, Alan’s son Mark Watts captured hundreds of hours of his father’s seminar sessions. Years later he dug up these recordings and digitally remastered select gems for the series “The Essential Alan Watts” in the mid-’90s.
This is Alan Watts in the most informal of settings. He’s relaxed, candid, and spontaneous, and it feels as if you’re right there with him in his living room. His spirit comes through in these psychedelic Californian ruminations, intriguing incantations, and compelling thoughts on existence. It’s a trip.
A decade later, New York-based musician Jas Walton found these recordings.
“I listened to them on the train every day for months—I’d be underground on the subway, totally lost in that world. Alan Watts is so good at condensing these mysterious cosmic questions into manageable ideas; it’s just the most reasonable thing I’ve ever heard. He talks with such a great cadence and natural rhythm, and that was what stood out to me the most. One day on a whim, while experimenting with making chord progression loops at home in Brooklyn, I just decided to drop Watts’ voice in and see how it matched up rhythmically. Some things would work and some things wouldn’t, and so then I thought, ‘Well, I can just kind of nudge this word a little late or nudge that phrase a little early,’ and then one day I got totally carried away and thought, ‘You know what, I have all afternoon, I’m gonna be strict about every word falling in line.’ That was the first one that I did, and then I kind of got the hang of it.” —Jas Walton
At the “Face the Facts” release party at Unoppressive Non-Imperialist Bargain Books
Born and raised in midcoast Maine, Jas moved to New York City where his eclectic musical interests quickly took root. He most recently performed as part of the Luaka Bop’s William Onyeabor tribute shows at BAM and on tour, with Jovanotti, Antibalas and EMEFE, as well as with The Roots, Father Figures, Superhuman Happiness, Kronos Quartet, Asphalt Orchestra, and Josh Garrels.
In collaboration with the Alan Watts Audio Archive—co-curated by Mark and Henry ‘Sandy’ Jacobs, who produced Alan Watts’s early psychedelic LPs (including "This is IT")—Face the Facts includes an eight-page booklet with images and interviews. As well as rare archival photos dug up by Mark, the booklet features in-depth conversations with him about his father’s public-speaking career and with Sandy about the early recording sessions and the explosive San Francisco cultural scene of the late ’50s and early ’60s.
