The recording project of songwriter and multi-instrumentalist J. Micah Nelson, Particle Kid draws on styles from across the decades to form his experimental folk sound. The psych of the sixties through seventies rock and jazz, right up to the alt rock of the nineties and beyond. It is fitting then that his latest record is titled Time Capsule, a collection of songs originally intended as a series of EPs, recorded across various times and locations with a list of impressive collaborators. Margo Price, J Mascis, Sean Ono Lennon, The Lovely Eggs and others all join Nelson at one point or another, each bringing their own sensibilities to what is a sprawling and ambitious record.
“The songs would be like cut-out pieces from magazines and the little weird segue interludes would be the glue that holds it all together,” Nelson explains. “I was thinking about how all of the art and music we make are like little time capsules, tangible forms of memories captured and frozen in time, like little plot points in our lives that exist now and we get to dig them up years later and revisit them.” The Overseas Artist Recordings release embraces this concept, each coming with a thumb drive loaded not only with the songs but videos too, as well as printed album artwork, industrial hemp seeds cultivated by Nelson himself and a physical ticket to a Particle Kid show scheduled for twenty years in the future.
No single track can quite capture the entirety of the project’s ambitious breadth or the Particle Kid sound, but slow burning psych folk song ‘All One Day (Shadow of the Sun)’ is as good a place as any to dive in. The expansive song sees Nelson invite Jim James and father Willie Nelson for a lockdown celebration. “[James], my dad and I all share birthdays in the same week,” Nelson explains, “so I invited him to sing on this song […] I liked the idea of all of us sharing a birthday week, singing a song together about the illusion of time.”
Time Capsule is out via Overseas Artists Recordings on the 22nd April and you can pre-order it now.