The story of Gitkin’s new album begins not with a riff, but with a sound on the wind. Down in New Orleans, where the air itself seems charged with spirit, Gitkin started hearing fragments that felt like they came from somewhere else. “I started hearing melodies that felt like they’d been left behind,” he recalls. “Nothing fully formed, but insistent. I made it my job to chase them down and give them shape without taming them.” Those whispers became Where the South Winds Wail. The record doesn’t unfold like a traditional collection of songs so much as a séance with an unknown past. Surf twang draped in shadows, blues exotica wandering into humid night, psychedelic cumbia tangled with echoes like an Afro-Amazon juke joint — each track a ghostly transmission, pulled from the air and reanimated in the present.

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