CIPHERS OF THE SAINTS

 

NEW FULL LENGTH ALBUM out now via PSYOP / Stone Poem

    "The Lodestones refers to the songs, and these songs were written in a van, a secret library, a remote island in the nether realms of the Pacific, an airport motel outside of Atlanta, on TV, and during a lifetime briefly spent in the gold rush ghost town in which they were recorded, before returning to San Francisco to begin again.

Regarding saints, names that come to mind are John Coltrane, Dianne DiPrima, Tecumseh, Sun Ra...  Holy names I hesitate to speak here, but I do because the ciphers they carved are paths into skies that are alive.  Songlines that create and destroy territory.  

Down below, in the trail of blood on the maps, where the compass spins and spirals, I take my own leaps of faith and litmus tests.  And even as a subtle emanation, and even in the face of the days we are so deep in, these songs take up their own odysseys, their own bent missions to bring you something.  Decipher as you will."  

-Jeffrey Rocketmild (San Francisco, 2025)

https://thelodestones.bandcamp.com/album/ciphers-of-the-saints

From Matthew Himes at Lighten Up Sounds:

    Brainchild of Californian poet, recording engineer, and hot pepper cultivator Jefferey Rocketmild Jefferson, The Lodestones step back in the ring with an elegant offering of straw-broom rock, pre-calamity projection, and twisted rustic twang from the deepest corner of the American nightmare. 

    Following 2021’s ‘Exile on Earth’, the San Francisco group bears a grand return to the recorded form, with ‘Ciphers of the Saints’ arriving as a veritable masterstroke of abstract spiritualism, smoky avant-strum, and cracked keystone lyricism.

    These are songs of love, about the orgies of death and freedom, and connection to a burning world. Love songs for the land disappearing, love for each other, and for the magic of corrosion. It’s about the free fall of society, about reducing people to objects, and choking on the plastic of bureaucratic necromancy. It’s free and dark, and deceptively beautiful, like the greatest of all evils. 

    The band has currently joined forces with the legendary psych-improv unit Jackie-o Mother Fucker on a tour across the UK, I can only imagine the fourth dimensional portal they’ll carry with them enroute.

    While the band self-describe as cryptic, I’d frame it as deeply embedded. Like a shining crystal splinter, warm and pulsing, which when removed reveals a wound of unimaginable depth and within, painful lessons learned.  

-MH