At a simple ghat along the Ganges river in Rishikesh, India, Luke Sweeney and his family laid his infant daughter’s ashes into the water and recited Hindu prayers.  As the river carried those ashes, a force bigger than his grief pulled Sweeney into an artistic process unlike any he had undertaken before.  For years, the ‘calm poseur’ had kept busy playing the part of San Francisco’s gangly trouble-making troubadour: recording three solo records, touring the western U.S. multiple times over, and lending his hand to co-conspirators Tim Cohen and Healing Potpourri.  But somehow in the wake of an unspeakable tragedy, when all time and music seemed to stop, he re-discovered the point of it all.

With Rishi serving as his guide, teacher, and muse, Sweeney started to track Garageband demos on his iPhone throughout India, with only a few crude pocket-sized instruments at hand.  Soon after returning to San Francisco, he was in a Mission District apartment working with engineers and co-producers Joe Santarpia (Mac DeMarco) and Roberto Pagano (Tonsstartsbandht) to bring his inspired vignettes to life as fully-realized songs in their homemade studio.  The process was scattered over two years time, as Sweeney’s Peace Meal album finally surfaced and he rounded a band together.  There was still grieving, conflict, struggle, and pain.  But as construction on the Rishi album continued, the songs started to reveal the bigger picture of life and death — with music serving as a cosmic conduit between the material and the spiritual world.

Straddling that line between the sacred and profane has always been a skill of Sweeney’s, but here his DIY pop tightrope act is taken to another level.  Deities and drifters alike play a part in a sonic procession that pulls from all corners of the world; everything from 808 beats, synth bass lines, Nile Rogers-esque strums, and groovy Prince-like party refrains sit alongside stoney 60’s-style interludes, jazzy futuristic spells, prog-rock guitar plucks and riffs, a children’s chorus and even Hindu chanting circles.  Orchestrated with loads of samples from Sweeney’s original demos, these recordings are as thrifty, raw and real as they are divinely crafted — navigated by a lyrical character so sincere that it could only be the voice of someone who has endured the darkest of life’s tribulations and lived to see the light on other side.  And now, these songs carry Rishi’s spirit like the Ganges carried her ashes.