Saintseneca returns with gratitude 

There came a point after Saintseneca released Pillar of Na in 2018 where frontman Zac Little stopped writing songs – a fitful stretch in which he briefly questioned if the music would ever again return to him. 

“And that was a troubling prospect,” Little said in mid-November, seated in a Clintonville coffee shop on a brief stop home before picking up the band’s ongoing tour in support of its just-released new album, Highwallow & Supermoon Songs (Lame-O Records). 

In that absence, Little turned to painting, starting off with monochrome works in which he stripped the process down to its most basic components and focused on “meditative brushwork,” as he explained it. Fittingly, when the songs finally began to return, they at first took similarly unadorned form, with tunes such as “Green Ink Pen” and “Sweet Nothing” acknowledging and celebrating the simple pleasures inherent in the act of creation, presented in a rootsier, more straightforward manner than Little had previously allowed.

“Some of the first ones that came back were a little more traditional in terms of their structures and arrangements, and they’re probably a little more traditional than I probably would have given myself permission to do in the past,” said Little, who will join his Saintseneca bandmates for a pair of local record release shows at Rumba Cafe on Saturday and Sunday, Nov. 22 and 23, with support from Snarls (Saturday) and Superviolet (Sunday). (The band will also headline an in-store at Used Kids Records alongside Radiator Hospital on Friday, Nov. 21.) “Before I would have been like, ‘Oh, that’s too conventional, it’s too boring.’ I always like to screw with my tunings and experiment with weird structures, but then you do that a bunch and sometimes it feels very different and weird to do something traditional. It’s just plain old chords, a plain old melody, but I’m vibing with it.”

As Little wrote, this universe continued to expand, with a number of the album’s tunes spinning into comparatively off-kilter directions. Witness “Infinity Leaf Clover,” which in its back half mutates into a frantic electro breakdown. Then there’s “Bitter Suite,” which finds Little harmonizing with AI-generated versions of himself – a discomforting sequence that serves as a critique of the technology – and then gives way to a buzzing, doom-laden passage built around the skittish rhythm of his now 19-month-old daughter’s heartbeat recorded in utero.

“The recording of her heartbeat is from a stress test, which is stressful, and their little heartbeat sounds so crazy, and it’s so fast,” he said. “And it’s so distinctive and almost shocking when you hear it, because you’re like, ‘Whoa, they’re in there swimming around in the void.’”

This could also double as a description of how Saintseneca songs tend to view us existing within this given plane, Little frequently reckoning with the transitional nature of life and exploring heady concepts such as faith, violence, beauty, love, corruption, connection, and the challenge inherent in fumbling forward through this morass with a degree of humanity intact. 

Part of the steady evolution that unfolded within the tracks gracing Highwallow & Supermoon can be attributed to Little having opted to extend the songwriting process well beyond the point he would have called it quits in the past. “I thought it would be more like the process I’m used to, which is more like, ‘Okay, I’ll just make a record, write some songs, fill it to the top, and move on,’” he said. “But as I began to do that, it just felt like it was continuing to expand. And I think I was just in a place where I was like, ‘Well, I’m just going to follow this and see where it goes.’”

Eventually, Little said, this vision became so expansive that it led him beyond earthly bounds, the musician coming to view the collection as a 15-song landscape orbited by two “moons” – the five-song Viridian and the final six songs of Cinnamon. (Each moon will feature in a different night at Rumba Cafe, with Saintsenenca landing on Viridian Saturday and Cinnamon Sunday).

In exploring this cosmos, Little also began to reconnect with the breezy pleasures he experienced in first picking up a guitar and stumbling his way onto a melody that felt as if it had found its way to him through the ether. “At the time that I was writing, or as I would say, finding these songs, I just felt a lot of gratitude, and I enjoyed it just for the sake of singing a song,” he said. “And it always gives back. That’s how I feel. As long as I’m bringing my attention to this process of discovery or creativity or whatever, it feels like it gives back two-fold, right? I just sat down with the guitar and then I got a melody. Well, I didn’t make up a melody. The melody just exists. It has always existed. I just sat down and was able to apprehend it, and that was because I chose to offer a little bit of time and attention. And for me, that’s a pretty profound experience.”