Imaad Wasif washing the eye of the land

PHOTO by NICK ZINNER

Imaad Wasif and the Two Part Beast “Wanderlusting”

I hear an ocean in my head, says Imaad Wasif—the sound of drones from the classical albums his father shipped from India to Palm Desert, where they arrived soggy from steerage with their covers and labels peeled away, and where they began to float without names or titles attached inside young Imaad’s mind, to be joined in harmony later by a deep B-flat. (The musical note a black hole makes, which is also Wasif’s favorite note.) At times of great focus, those notes and drones resolve into shapes, he says, but mostly it’s the ocean, an idea materialized in a Salton Sea video that puts Imaad in Jodorowsky robes and mask fading in and out over the shore.

His parents left something wrecked behind them in their native India—violated marriage codes, Imaad thinks, though he admits he doesn’t really know much about their history, and after that waterlogged trip by ship they settled in the high desert, a place he now somehow thinks of fondly despite how miserable he says he was. One late night as a child, home awake and sick, he heard Neil Young’s “Sugar Mountain” float over from the Sears radio in the next room: “I don’t even know why I was hearing it on the radio—I never heard it after that,” he says. “But I remember hearing that and the static it was coming through and how forlorn and distant his voice sounded. I remember that really affected me. And not till years later did I hear Neil Young and put the two things together.”

His newest album Strange Hexes—the electric follow-up to an acoustic self-titled, with drummer Adam Garcia and bassist/keyboardist Bobb Bruno, currently exploring David Scott Stone levels of omnipresence—finds connection with La Monte Young as much as Neil, however, tangling modal drones around a ’68-style power-trio he’s named Two Part Beast. Wasif favors guitar so stripped you can hear each component soundwave lap the speaker: On the generously named “Unveiling,” he strips open an introductory note so fiercely its little legs don’t ever get the signal to quit wiggling, and then adds a modest loop of melody that will unravel into something new after barely one verse; “Wanderlusting” breaks into a hollowed-out middle passage that lets distortion dissipate like smoke as Wasif sings, “Only things you do can make me feel so far away . . . ”

He would have been a cellular biologist, he says, but his Jabberjaw-era band lowercase pulled him into a new band called Alaska!, who toured with and eventually joined Lou Barlow’s New Folk Explosion, and he’s also recently spent time as the touring guitarist of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs—“That was a really serendipitous kind of crossing of paths,” he says. Since 2001, there hasn’t been a day he hasn’t ferociously worked and rehearsed and written, sometimes to the point he feels like he’s leaving his body. As he put together Hexes, he says, he felt possessed: “Yeah, a lot of writing came out of me at that time,” he says. “Really now I can look at it and see there’s an exploration of love or really the madness that I feel out of love—I had completely given myself to being a vessel.”

“I’m so completely absorbed in music that at times I’m just not capable—I cannot function in reality,” he continues. “I’ve woken up with the guitar next to me. But that’s the dangerous thing—allowing yourself not to control the insanity, you know? ‘Out in the Black’ has connections to that idea. I was exploring that much more—or ‘Coil.’ Those are really my connections to whatever this fucking catchphrase of mine is now—‘the madness of love.’ Put that on my tombstone!”

IMAAD WASIF WITH BIRDS OF AVALON, TIJUANA KNIFE FIGHT AND GUESTS ALEX’S BAR | 2913 E ANAHEIM ST | LONG BEACH 90804 | ALEXSBAR.COM | SUN 9PM | $5 | 21+

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