J.WLSN - The Rush (2025)

A note from Liam Keenan

Sometimes in life, if you’re paying attention, you realize that someone has taught you something without teaching. Like a transmission of a previously unknown knowledge, an unshrouding of wisdom that is exchanged across the energy fields that we’d best call ‘the ether’.
This concept of the ether is perhaps the only recurring tenet that underpins the creative orbit of J.WLSN.

Where is energy flowing in any given moment in time? This hour, this year, this decade.

Here is an artist whose thinking has more in common with a Tibetan monk or a particle physicist. Time in the ether with J.WLSN reveals to me that everything matters, down to the smallest detail, yet at the same time, nothing matters in the ways we think it does.

An important artist is set to play an important show. In between the rigid structures of this organized time and unorganized chaos come slivers of a quiet calling. The magnetic pull of the ether. A piano hired for someone else, an iPhone voice memo, chords felt out in the dark through feeling.

This is the world of J.WLSN that has so shifted my perceptions. Why do we impose fixed rules upon ourselves around making art and being an artist, when everything is just relational moments in time? I think the teaching is, there are no real rules.
Probably best not to overthink it.