Jonas Wilson - Smash The Control Machine (LP)

A musician of unflinching dedication and vision, Jonas Wilson is a true polymath in a wide-ranging array of musical disciplines. Throughout a three-decade career as a multi-instrumentalist touring musician, producer, soundtrack composer, and independent label owner, Wilson has most recently spent time elevating the live outfits of the both the Heartless Bastards and Alejandro Escovedo, partnered with Ghostland Observatory singer Aaron Behrens to form the dream-pop/rock duo The Midnight Stroll, and built a prolific production portfolio. If that weren’t enough, he has enabled a robust stable of Austin-based bands to work, create, and grow as the founder of Mr. Pink Records.

Now Wilson is back with Smash The Control Machine, his first full length album of all original work since 2020’s Science Fiction Post Blues. In a career that has been defined by freedom-affirming left turns, it’s his most ambitious, subversive, and iconoclastic work yet. Combining elements of trip hop, punk rock, experimental jazz, electronic music and surf guitar, he has concocted a potent and explosive brew of unmistakable originality. Citing Sonic Youth, Brian Eno as ever-present through lines of influence, STCM was also influenced by reconnecting to the work of Patti Smith and Laurie Anderson, as well as by time spent touring in recent years as direct support to The Flaming Lips. But when a chance encounter led to the realization that legendary jazz trumpeter , Composer and Pulitzer Prize nominee Hannibal Lokumbe had been his neighbor for years, Wilson not only reconnected with his love of jazz through a primary source, but was likewise heavily inspired by Lokumbe’s prodigious output as a painter, sculptor, and poet.

This cross pollination of music and visual media let Wilson down a path of intense dedication to painting and collage, resulting in a series of works intended to accompany Smash The Control Machine and highlight its core concepts: namely, that we are living in an Orwellian period of genocide, economic upheaval, and authoritarian political drift and and simultaneously humanity is facing a techno existentialist crisis as we plunge forward into the first AI era .