Cyrus Moussavi: Tell me about how the project came about, what you each brought to it, how you approached it…

Andre Raiah:  The first time we encountered each other was at a show that I was playing in Brown Calculus with Angel Bat Dawid. That was the first time I'd ever seen Roman.  He brought a photo of Alice Coltrane and was telling me about how he had studied spiritual practices with the group of folks that studied under her. And then I saw a post of him playing at one of the first Be Present Art Group shows. He was playing just super out sax at some dive bar in Portland. I’m like, "Yo, who is this dude?” So I hit him up on Instagram.

On the way to the first rehearsal with Roman, “Journey to Satchidananda” was playing on the radio. It was all feeling really aligned. My daughter is named Turiya, and Alice Coltrane has been a huge influence in my life and in my family. 

Ever since then it has felt like everything has just clicked and locked in.  I would say we met April of 2022, and these recordings were from May or June. So as soon as we got together, we made these recordings. It would be super long sessions, that's usually how I tracked it.

We had tons of music to go through, and Roman and Eric [Isaacson] stepped into that part and took the initiative. That's not my strong suit. I just record it and I'm like, “It's all good, I like it all.” I could just listen to it myself for the rest of my life. 

Roman Norfleet: I can be at the very other end of the spectrum from Dre. I'm like, “No, this has to be perfect, it has to sound right. Take this out, add this in.” 100 edits before it comes out. So I think we balance each other out well.

I sent Eric four of our sessions at about an hour-and-a-half to two hours long each. We had a listening session, and then I took it back and edited what I thought was cool. We  just had a back and forth with that based off his experience with the label. 

It was the first time we were working with the label and my first time having someone else involved in editing and being a part of this creative process. It was a very new experience, but I actually enjoyed it because of my particular nature. Sometimes it could help to have someone I trust listen.

The music was recorded in such a free manner. It was like the meeting of two worlds, and we were just still learning each other. When we decided to release it, the next step was to kind of go into my prayer closet,  just ask God, the universe, “How can we use these songs? How could they be tools? How could we repurpose them, and how could we make them more purposeful?” And so it was that process where I started to hear certain imagery with songs and certain themes and kind of narrowed it down to the structure and esoteric symbols and mysticism around it that you see now. 

Dre was also instrumental in that because he actually brought the term MerKaBa to the table. He was mentioning this sacred shape. He even had a little sculpture of it.

Andre: It's a little crystal thing that somebody had gifted me for my birthday. 

Roman:  Through that, I started to research MerKaBa more, and found that MerKaBa meant Ezekiel’s vision of the wheel in the Bible, which is a cool story for me. It basically talks about aliens and other worldly beings coming to the planet. Ka means life force, and Ba means personality, so those are two parts of fullness in the human experience in ancient Egyptian spirituality. So there's many threads that kind of link in this name that I found really, really wonderful. And here we are.

Cyrus: Here we are. It’s interesting that this music was actually recorded before Be Present Art Group record, before The Cosmic Tones. It feels like a next step somehow. 

Roman: A lot of people do think it's the next step, which makes me excited, because if people think this is the next step, imagine us actually going into it in the now for the actual next step, which is what we plan to do. 

Cyrus: Can you tell me more about how this record developed in the editing process, the distilling process? The final record is very tight, but it comes from hours of recordings. 

Roman: We call it a psychic excavation of our own music. At that time we didn't know it was going to be the MerKaBa Brotherhood. We were just being. It’s a testament to just allowing ourselves to be used, allowing music to flow through us. It doesn't have to always be specific in that moment. Later on things can be revealed. I find that beautiful.

This is the first time I've retrospectively gathered a lot of music from years ago to put out. Going back to it, excavating, gathering the deeper meanings, trying to see what it was all for. This record is making sense of it.

Cyrus: It reminds me of making documentaries, where you film all this stuff, and you have a general idea of what you're trying to do, but it's only in the edit, sometimes years later, where you're like, “Oh wait, this is actually about this thing, and I was thought it was about something else.” When you realize that you’re learning something new from your own film, I guess that’s when it’s done. 

Roman: Totally, exactly. 

Cyrus: Dre, I see the Lee Perry LP in the background, and I saw the photos of your studio. Can you tell me about your approach to electronics and recording?

Dre:  I first came into music through producing and trying to make beats. Just before I moved to Portland, I started falling more in love with piano, and I was trying to study music recording at the same time. I felt like if I was going to be a recording engineer, it was going to be limiting. I didn’t want to be recording music I wasn’t into. So my process just evolved and I was able to work with other producers that also approach producing in a really musical, collaborative way. I started finding that these people like Omari Jazz and Alex Meltzer. We could all get together and jam really effortlessly, and it kept evolving. 

This was also around the time that Eric and Libby [Werbel] were curating the Sun Ra exhibit [at the Portland Art Museum]. My partner Mia was helping to curate one section of it. When the exhibit opened up, I played a beat set and I had just basically sampled a bunch of Sun Ra stuff, made beats out of it. I’ve been a fan of his philosophy and music for a long time, but that was a challenge to steep myself in it more. Eric gave us a ton of records to dive into, and the thing that really stuck with me was this idea that nature doesn’t repeat itself, so why should I?

As a producer, that’s a challenge because stuff gets recorded once and then you’re just pressing a button and the song comes out, you know? So I’ve been coming up with a process where I could actually play things differently every time. Developing a collection of ideas that I’m coming back to to convey a certain feeling, but it’s not going to be the same. 

By the end of the Sun Ra exhibit, we did this final two hour performance. We were just jamming, and it was incredible.

 I also was diving into the world of multi-tracking everything, so that I would have a lot more flexibility in the mixing. And obviously reggae is huge, the way that they were able to approach the recording of the music, the studio as its own instrument.

Those were just the concepts that I was working on through the pandemic, just kind of dialing in. And then on the other side, it felt like such a perfect match to be playing with Roman, you know? I felt like that helped to push me even further out in the ways I was approaching it. It's like, “Oh, this rhythm doesn't have to be a certain kind of way. I can just get crazy like a drummer would in this session.” Just approaching it differently than that habitual way of doing it.

Cyrus: Roman, you improvise with so many people and play such open and free music. What is it like playing with someone using electronics and not natural instruments? Is there a difference or…

Roman: I don't think there was really an issue or like something that stood out with him being an electronic producer, because prior to me picking up a sax, I was electronically producing as well, using Logic and an MPC and stuff like that. So the electronic sound wasn't new, more so the acoustic instrument playing was new. By the time I met Dre, I had been playing for some time, maybe seven or eight years, and his world just brought me back to my electronic world, but now with the sax. So it just blended.

I look at the saxophone as a percussion instrument. It's like a giant shaker or a giant bell, or it's like a crash cymbal. I don't look at it like, you know, like a lot of saxophone players, so that allows me tremendous freedom, and I think it works well with Dre's tremendous freedom in the way he approaches music. I will be playing, and you hear a rhythm, and then all of a sudden the drums just come in on a totally different rhythm. Like on the Galgilam track they come in on a whole different… All those things unlock new ways of thinking about music, and it's really spiritual, it's really organic, it's really cosmic. And not just like in these sensational, esoteric ways of saying these things, but like it's literally just us being, and then making sense of it after It's divine. It's like when you go through things in life, heartbreak, death, and then years later the revelation comes as to how that could have helped you and why, and you know, trying to make sense of it. The same thing happened in this music.

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It's 2026. We're deep in the future and there's an encouraging number of independent record stores in America - around 2,000 (that's one for every 171,000 people). I believe this is a sign that we're on the cusp of a revolutionary turn back to the old ways of connecting over music . Murmurs about the murder of all beautiful music cultures at the hands of artificial intelligence, streaming and social media are overblown. 

That's my opinion, and it's true. 

How do I know the ascendance of social media, AI and streaming has peaked and will now experience a rapid decline? The signs are everywhere. When's the last time you talked to someone who had anything positive to say about social media, streaming, or AI generated music? Meanwhile, everyone is talking about their need to get back to the old ways. As Philip K Dick, the man who saw the future clearer than anyone, said, "When two people dream the same dream, it ceases to be an illusion."

We're all dreaming of a world where culture's happening in real spaces. Some even go beyond dreaming and physically manifest businesses where people can live this old fashioned way. It's happening all the time. Below is a rundown of just four new record shops that opened / are opening in the past couple months. 

UP ON THE SUN RECORDS
Yucca Valley, California - population 22,000

   I grew up in a Los Angeles neighborhood covered in a sprawl of strip malls. In each one there'd be some odd combo of businesses such as a Chinese restaurant, tanning salon, bail bondsmen, liquor store, tienda, etc. There was no rhyme or reason for the combination of businesses beyond them being in the same rent bracket. As a kid I'd often find myself stuck in these weird commerce islands while my parents shopped or worked. My mom had a job at a Microwave Oven store in a strip mall, which catapulted her into a career as the host of a TV cooking show called "Microwaves Are For Cooking".  Here's an add for their cookbook -

Watch

Once in a while there'd be a record store in one of these strip mall prisons. When there was, I would spend endless time there. My sister and I would stop in one I can't recall the name of when walking home from school and spend an hour checking stuff out but never buying anything, trying to remain invisible to the store's clerks as we snuck our "free samples" at the listening station. I thought the record store clerks were magical oracles - keepers of all secret knowledge. They had the lost book of Thoth in the backroom next to the Ark Of The Covenant. They whispered of sages like Captain Beefheart, DEVO and The Gun Club. A philistine like me was not worthy of looking the clerks in the eye, let alone receiving their holy council.  I gleaned what pieces of wisdom I could as I spied from the listening station. In hindsight, I now know these clerks were actually snobby jerks, but at the time I took their snobbishness as genuine superiority.

Up On The Sun records is opening on May 27th. It's a triangle shaped shop in a strip mall ,squished between a liquor store and hair salon behind a still under construction Starbucks. From the outside it looks exactly like the1980's Los Angeles record stores I haunted as a youth. A timeless sign that just says "Records and cassettes" is lit up over it. Though its exterior is humble, the selection of records is shockingly amazing. 

Owner Jay Martin has been collecting since he was a teenager and a good percentage of his booty is now for sale. Every record is in eerily perfect shape and priced fair (I should know, as I spent a couple weeks down there pricing the stock). Jay is not a snobby clerk by any stretch. I try to imagine if I was a kid walking in there. Instead of ignoring me like the clerks of my childhood, Jay would probably hand me a pile of life changing blues records, buy me a soda pop and insist I luxuriate at the listening station. He'd regail me about The Meat Puppets, RL Burnside, Toots And The Maytals and Funkadelic while being sympathetic to my more pedestrian love of radio classic rock and oldies. 

   The fact that the shop is in a strip mall in Yucca Valley gives it a romantic power. The great hidden gem store we all dream of stumbling into.

   Jay moved from Portland to Yucca Valley to realize this dream. He hasn't worn close toed shoes since he arrived in the desert. 

BRAMBLE
Lewisburg, West Virginia - Population 3,900

   In an even smaller town than Yucca Valley, Bramble opened about two months ago. Owner Frankie Almutawa worked at The Mississippi Records shop for three years. Every month or so she'd tell us about a new direction she may pursue in life - writing plays, being a square office worker, making music, curating art, studying holistic medicine and more. She lit out of Portland open to whatever the universe handed her. 

After a road trip to discover a new place to live she settled in Lewisburg, a town where she knew no one. A space became available and she decided to throw down and start a shop that sells records and random goods. She cast the die....

I was on the phone with her yesterday and told her the advice my old boss, who owned Saturn Records, gave me when I asked him if I should start my own record shop. He said, "Say you're lost in the woods and you know search parties are out looking for you. What advice do they give you in the boy scouts manual? Should you wander around looking for the search parties, or should you just find a place with good visibility, shade, and some water, then stay put and wait for the search parties to find you?" The answer is obvious. Record stores are good spots to be found. 

 Bramble's record collection is small but potent and the prices are cheap. They're hosting concerts and generally open to the universe. I feel confident that whatever cultural voids Lewisburg needs filled, Frankie will rise to the occasion. 

You can sign up for their newsletter here -https://bramblewv.com/pages/contact

COSMIC SOUNDS
West Allis, Wisconsin - Population 59,500

    After working at Music Millennium for something like 23 years, Zac Reno is opening his own shop just west of Milwaukee on May 30th. Zac is one of those sue genius record store clerks. His head's swimming with esoteric knowledge about all kinds of music, horror movies and pinball machines. I imagine Cosmic Sounds will be the ultimate expression of his aesthetics. Very much the kind of store I dream of finding in a small suburb. Seeds will be planted and lives will be changed by this spot. 

DOWN HOME MUSIC
El Cerrito, California - Population 26,000

     Not a new store by any stretch, but newly transformed into a nonprofit under the management of its long standing staff. Down Home was originally opened in 1976 by Chris Strachwitz. From the get go it was the center of all kinds of important cultural activity. Arhoolie Records was run out of there. Filmmaker Les Blank had an office in the building. They were the sole distributor of some of the most important record labels ever such as Folklyric, County, Yazoo, Original Music and Sun Ra's Saturn label. The shop is unpretentious while housing more cultural gravitas than anyone else out there. 

After Chris passed in 2023 the fate of the shop was uncertain. Luckily the community around it and its employees stepped up and re-incorporated it as a non profit. Many of my most cherished record buying memories happened at Down Home and well....the Mississippi Records label would definitely not exist without it. 

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