Jacob Cummings is an LA-based producer, multi-instrumentalist and singer-songwriter raised in the small surf town of New Smyrna Beach in Florida. Though largely known as a photographer and visual artist, Cummings is a classically-trained saxophonist and “total band kid” with a natural aptitude for arrangement and a boardwalk-gothic sensibility inspired by his formative memories of the Florida coast. Cummings debuted as an artist with the instrumental “COVID project” Slow Paradise in 2020 and subsequently released Fishing from Heaven with his partner Laney Tripp in 2021. Southern & Enlightened marks the first time Cummings has featured his vocals on record, and he considers it to be his solo debut proper.

Cummings recorded Southern & Enlightened in a home once owned by his grandmother, who passed away shortly before recording. The artist stayed for a month before the house was due to be torn down, going through his grandmother’s affairs and watching Ken Burns’ Baseball. One imagines the memories of the old house and the sadness of its impending destruction seeped into the music—and perhaps some of Burns’ old, weird Americana as well. This is tactile music, alive with the feeling of sea spray, sand against skin, winds blowing through open cabin windows, the textures of old wood and burnished brass. 

Though Cummings’ arrangements are kin to LA’s tradition of studio psychedelia, reminiscent of Van Dyke Parks’ Song Cycle or Brian Wilson’s Smile at its foggiest, there’s a pleasingly Atlantic undertone that’ll appeal to fans of Louis Malle’s Atlantic City, Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers, the seashell-eyed music of Real Estate and Beach House. Southern & Enlightened presses into deeply personal territory, dealing with themes of family, eternity and death, yet it makes its impression of melancholy and impermanence as strongly through the lyrics as Cummings’ pitch-perfect understanding of arrangement, spacing and timbre.

Southern & Enlightened is accompanied by a full visual album shot and directed by Cummings in Florida.

$13 adv + DICE fees / $16 at the door

Doors at 8 PM