ALAN WATTS TURNS 100 + debut announcement!

COMING SOON...

Celebrating Alan Watts’s 100th Birthday Year, Figure & Ground Releases

Jas Walton’s Face The Facts: Words By Alan Watts In Spring 2015

A 10-Inch Vinyl EP That Samples Recordings Of Watts’s Seminar Sessions And Includes Previously Unreleased Photos And Stories From Mountain Center Archives

This year, Alan Watts turns 100. Figure & Ground celebrates his centennial with Face the Facts: Words by Alan Watts, an EP that takes the recordings of Watts’s early seminar sessions and sets them in time to original music. In collaboration with the Alan Watts Audio Archive, this EP features previously unreleased photos and stories about Watts’s public speaking career and early recordings.

A British-born Zen philosopher known as the foremost interpreter of Eastern thought for the West, Alan speaks with inspired simplicity. His wit and wisdom was 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 screenings. His words are as relevant now as they were then.

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 houseboat 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. After listening to them on the subway every day for months, he set them to music...

TRACKLIST

1A. Aperture

2A. Sound of the Rain

3B. Face the Facts

4B. What About Background?