(light music) My favorite thing is to see bands that have this unpredictability to them, where people show up and they don't know what's gonna happen.

That's the most exciting thing.

I'm Jasper Lee and I play music and make art.

I started off as a drummer and then just taught myself other instruments.

Just, you know, having fun and playing music seemed like the connecting thread amongst me and my friends.

I really like collaborating with different people as a way of finding what I can do in these different scenarios.

So, that's sort of what I did with "flusnoix," being there to fill in on whatever I can.

And it was this freeform experimental project that was different every single time.

Since it was different every time we played, I feel like there's more of a reason to document it because it's never gonna be the same.

We would just record our practices every week and any shows that we did.

And we made two albums kind of back to back, and that was the beginning of Sweet Wreath.

We decided to make a name, like a label.

Sweet Wreath is an ongoing experimental project that takes on a lot of different forms.

It has this heavy musical component of being a kind of a channel for experimental music, but it also has this other art and writing component.

It's just really a kind of a network of experimental artists in Birmingham, like Davey Williams, LaDonna Smith, Jimmy Griffin, people that were doing music that's hard to classify.

And it kind of was a natural thing for me to invite someone to come to like a practice space and just play and make some recordings.

And if we liked it, we would make it into an album of some kind.

It's interesting to me to blur that line of putting out music releases, but then there'll be a book and some other format.

I don't see a lot of labels doing that.

And to me, it just seems natural to, you know, not just focus on one medium.

So, this is a project we did just recently that was a group art project of places related to Sun Ra's history in Birmingham that were important to his musical development and kind of his philosophical development, too.

I'm really captivated by that idea of artists soaking in their media environment and then that somehow coming through what they make.

So, we wanted to provide something like this map.

We just made a ton of copies of these and took them to the record stores and down to the Birmingham Public Library.

"Sweet Wreath Speaks!"

was a way of trying something completely different down in the middle of the city in Railroad Park.

We wanted to have this open-ended, experimental radio broadcast where we built this bamboo radio tower to kind of mock the radio towers on Red Mountain or just sort of like refer to them in this way that was like, this is our version of what we think, you know, radio should be, something that is completely open to people to participate in.

So we invited a bunch of musicians to perform at the park, but also people to send in recordings for us to play.

And we played those over a short range radio signal that we set up through the tower.

So, some of the speakers were talking about urban farming.

That, to us, was a really cool parallel, thinking about them finding these open spaces to re utilize and then also thinking about open spaces on the airwaves to use.

So, tying the idea of transmission with ecology was part of what the "Speaks!"

project was about.

Birmingham is, and maybe Alabama in general is a little bit culturally isolated.

And so, something about that just, I think it kind of generates maybe a more particular kind of music and art.

And there's even something that I was talking about with Jimmy Griffin.

The only reason any of us are here specifically is because of mining.

The birth of Birmingham and Irondale, as well, comes from the mines at Ruffner Mountain and Red Mountain, the geographical properties of this area and the magnetism in the soil from all the iron, and even seeing it, like, wash down the mountain when it rains.

And it's just these pools of red water.

What if there's a special kind of plant that grows near here in the shape of a wreath maybe, and there's these red berries on it that soak up the iron from the soil?

All the bats from the mines come out and they eat the berries and it sensitizes them to certain frequencies and sounds.

We just like thinking about these bats, eating the berries from a sweet wreath and then flying into town towards these sounds of music happening or the rhythms of people playing and thinking about the sonic mineral framework of living here specifically.

So that's a whole other layer of what Sweet Wreath is to us as like a mythological connection to the landscape itself.

(gentle mystical music)