BIO
(b. June 1968)
Jeffrey Alexander grew up in a Baltimore Maryland church, where his father was the preacher and his mother the organist/choir director.
He has produced works in a wide variety of genres over the past 30 years exploring variations and experiments in folk, jazz, rock and minimalism, including live performances
in over 20 countries. He was formerly the Program Director of AS220 in Providence Rhode Island, where he curated four international music festivals, hosted artist residencies
and booked hundreds of events. He has also been a carpenter, booking agent, FM disc jockey, espresso bar cafe owner, record label owner, driven an Amish farm truck,
worked in record stores in three states, ran the A/V department at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and lived in a van on tour with the Grateful Dead for several years.
“Jeffrey Alexander has a long, meandering career in the subterranean depths of the New Weird America, where free/freak folk, post-rock, and experimental electronics intersect.
From The Iditarod to his recent Dire Wolves project and his shepherding of the now defunct Secret Eye label, Alexander has remained a stalwart practitioner on the outer
fringes.” - Max Burke
“Alexander, who has performed in The Iditarod, Dire Wolves, Black Forest/Black Sea,
and Jackie O Motherfucker, continues the psychedelic/drone/sound collage experimentation he’s perfected with those groups, and thrusts it to the far reaches of the known universe.
His compositions inspire awe at the star stuff flitting through my mind right now, the patterns and transmissions penetrating constellations and nebulae in their attempt to
communicate with what’s out there.” - Ryan Masteller
"Jeffrey Alexander is one of those guys whose brain and hands are constantly in motion whether working with bands, doing solo stuff, installations, paintings, label shit…whatever.
Anyway, he’s always a pleasure to work with, and we have done so on many occasions." - Byron Coley
"Jeffrey Alexander is a fixture in a free-wheeling, Grateful Dead-loving, guitar jam underground, a founder of the Iditarod and Black Forest/Black Sea and a sometime member of Jackie O Motherfucker. His Direwolves splice acid folk with a buzzing, humming motoric-ness that edges near Stereolab, but his latest band, the Heavy Lidders, is pure transcendental pleasure. In her review, Jennifer Kelly noted that, “These songs take their time to loosen and relax, pursuing repetitive vamps until the edges melt away and the hard colors swirl into pastels.” - Dusted
- COMING SOON in 2023: All-new Jeffrey Alexander solo full-length on the Aural Canyon label (Texas) and a vinyl LP reissue of Reyes on Feeding Tube (USA)/Ramble Records (Australia)
MUSIC
Flutterings, Feeding Tube Records 2022
Reyes, Garden Portal 2021
Ashley Paul + Jeffrey Alexander duo, Astral Editions 2021
Sounds From The Bardo, Psychedelic Sangha 2021
Meditations For Beowulf, Feeding Tube Records 2019
Wayfinding Beacons From Planet To Planet, Pome Pome Tones 2015
PRESS
Jeffrey Alexander interview in Primitive Man Soundz, April 2023 - link
"These days I’ve had Jeffrey Alexander’s Heavy Lidders on, well, heavy rotation. The band’s output has been particularly potent these past few years. Dovetailing out of the great run of Dire Wolves records its hard to sometimes remember that Alexander’s output spans the further reaches of psychedelic composition, from The Iditarod’s English Rain-soaked folk and it’s count-point in chamber-folk Black Forest / Black Sea, to Alexander’s more outre sounds solo. This release touches on the latter ... Flutterings embraces the spaces between Alexander’s usual genre touchstones. There’s a compositional element to it — deep New Age-bent excursions with an emphasis on late night pondering. Yet, the record also feels tethered (if the floating pieces here could ever truly be classified as tethered) to the free flow of Dire Wolves’ elemental nature." (Raven Sings The Blues)
"Feeding Tube continues to champion some of the greatest underground weirdos around. Case-in-point, Jeffrey Alexander, lead of Dire Wolves, and a man with a long legacy in the DIY music scene since the 90s. The Dire Wolves crew has been busy this year. Their Grow Towards the Light stands out as a highlight of their prolific output. The jams found on that album are definitely tempered on this solo excursion from Jeffrey Alexander. Plethora of instrumentation including string bells, bamboo saxophone, singing bowl, fife and a talking book phonograph (!) fill out a trippy album of psychedelic meanderings. This truly is “celestial navigation music”. (Philosophy Of The World, Best-Album-Of-2019)
"If you don’t immediately recognize the name Jeffrey Alexander, you might still have crossed his path. Currently based in Philadelphia and previously situated in San Francisco, he’s amassed a formidable list of recordings with Dire Wolves, Iditarod and Black Forest/Black Sea, sharing bills with third-eye-minded musicians such as Bardo Pond, Elkhorn and Lau Nau... Alexander’s acoustic guitar sets the stage for a lazy Brazilian revery. But his picking is overtaken by noises that feel like they were beamed from a distant star and bounced to your speakers by a sound mirror set up inside Area 51. The melody is voiced by delay-dipped keyboard tones and pulled off center by the pitch-shifting current of a talking-book phonograph. As the album progresses, the tunes elongate and the backdrops swirl, and by the time it’s over, you might be wondering why no one bothered to fit your armchair with a seatbelt." (Magnet Magazine, Essential New Music 2021)
"I feel Jeffrey Alexander’s music has only tangentially graced our shores…we heard one compilation by The Iditarod, and have a little passing familiarity with Black Forest / Black Sea, but everyone says that Dire Wolves from San Francisco are really the thing to investigate. Alexander is also a mover-and-shaker for doing useful things like organising festivals and gigs and running the labels Secret Eye Records and Pome Pome Tones. He’s here today with Meditations For Beowulf (FEEDING TUBE RECORDS FTR470), which turns out to be a surprisingly varied, compelling, and gently trippy record of tunes, instrumentals and songs. A lot to savour in his very natural approach to picking up instruments and making noises in the recording studio, such that you soon forget this is a solo album – I mean it sparkles with life, warmth, and ideas, and is not mired in introspective threads or cobwebs." (The Sound Projector, UK)
"Its already been a pretty impressive year from Jeffrey Alexander. The recently released Dire Wolves album is fresh in RSTB’s best of the year and he’s got a solo jaunt on the way from Feeding Tube. This time the maelstrom that marked Grow Towards The Light is tempered. Instead, the album explores solo sojourns through the dark, favoring instrumentals that scrape at the corner debris of psychedelia and churn the subconscious a turn or two while they’re at it.
Alexander’s pieces creep through the echo, delicate and dewy with hope in some spots (“Rewinding”) but more often creeping with eerie unease. There’s a dusting of crackle and hiss, not unlike The Caretaker’s most recent explorations into the trauma and trials of dementia, only here the forlorn linger of jazz halls is replaced with a lost echo of bittersweet psych-folk. The memories crumble on like a found hurdy gurdy left to rot in the woods, revived by the ghosts of an intangible past." (Raven Sings The Blues)
"On his latest offering, Water Meditations, Jeffrey explores churning swirls of shruti box drones, chord-organ moods, the noisy spices of a cracklebox and synthesizer, and some light acoustical accents from a marimba and psaltery. Each instrument equally contributes for a truly transformative performance, placing the listener’s mind in the clouds, and their soul in the streams." (Tiny Mix Tapes)
"Jeffrey Alexander, of Black Forest/Black Sea and Jackie-O Motherfucker, brought some minimal gear to this solo set, seated at a table with what looked like a plastic toolbox, a couple pedals and ribbon synth. He used the gear to map out a spot somewhere between science kit oscillator drones and ambient prog. This piece leans towards the latter — Alexander asked the crowd, "does anyone feel like a third-stage Guild navigator?" after it wound down." (live review of Toronto solo performance in Mechanical Forest Sound, Canada)
PRESS PHOTOS
right click for hi-res
CONTACT