Day Soul Exquisite’s Strength in Numbers

PHOTO BY LILY WENBAO.

I met Day Soul Exquisite the same day I made my very first friendship bracelet.

I’d never made one before because those were never the types of parties I got invited to as a kid. But then, at Belltown Bloom, I made a trip to the lounge on the top floor of the new Crocodile complex, and I found the plastic bin with the colorful alphabetic beads and saw my opportunity. Surrounded by La Croix and Uncrustables and legions of artists reveling in the swanky accommodations, I got to work fulfilling what had been missing from my childhood.

(yes, it was for Alicia)

I had already spent minutes struggling to position the end of a tiny elastic cord through an L when someone in a pair of camo overalls and glitter behind their glasses approached the table. It took me a moment, but my mind flashed back an hour, when I had seen this person onstage at Madame Lou’s; Thomas Arndt had supplied auxiliary percussion to their band’s sprawling, elaborate jazz-soul arrangements. Some of them I’d heard before, but I was most struck by “Abattoir,” a track indicting the scourge of police brutality that morphed from a tense two-chord rumination to the precipice of violence. Xiomara Dupree’s breath ripped through her saxophone like sirens piercing the ears while Josh Pehrson pounded on his drums: a gulf of distance from the fragile moment of silence that introduced the song, and yet just as harrowing.

Upstairs, dispersed among their peers, the band were celebrating the performance. I didn’t get the chance to speak to the rest of them at the time, but I caught lead vocalist Francesca Eluhu blissfully reclining on a chair, her hair a cascading firework of pearlescent crimps. Lillian Minke Tahar, the band’s keyboardist, sat next to her, her own locks the color of the ocean itself; Zora Seboulisa, her six-string bass no longer slung over her shoulder, was right there as well. I pulled the cord taut around my wrist and cropped the long ends short with a pair of scissors.

JOSH (on Belltown Bloom)
I was seeing people
that I knew from Bellingham
Seattle
in-between
who don't even play in a band right now.
Maybe they're just like
audio engineers
or they're writers as well.
It was my first experience
being in a series of rooms
with all the same sorts of people together.

Part of the reason I push myself to interview local artists is because I’m genuinely invested in the reasoning behind their art. It’s not just that everyone wants something different from the fruits of their craft, to different degrees of virtue. To me, there’s virtue itself in the effort. In 2023, the state of the music industry has become so piteous that even the most blatantly entrepreneurial among us commonly find scant feasibility in a career.

No one does this shit for the money. I’m interested in what fills that hole, and what I learned weeks later, flanked by five-sixths of the band at Eluhu’s apartment, was that Day Soul Exquisite exist mainly to be there for each other: as support, as bolstering voices, and as amplifiers for the combination of their creativities.

I’ve been listening back to the recording as I’m writing (I’m doing it right now actually) and I can’t help but smile at the dynamic I’m bearing witness to. Everyone in the room loves each other genuinely, and I start to find myself pulled into that gravity. Inside jokes and fond memories bounce, feedback-like, off the walls; Zora and I share a love for the work of Hanif Abdurraqib, while I spur Josh to wax about Deafheaven’s decade-old black-metal masterpiece, Sunbather. A long tangent about billy woods’ Maps inspires Francesca to hook up her phone to the speakers and blast the first track, and we sit marveling as woods’ cascading flow, awestruck.

In between these moments anecdote after anecdote about the serendipity of these people having met, and how technically they’re still meeting, still learning about each other.

The band started with Francesca, who was raised French-American in Nashville, Tennessee. Her childhood was graced by song; her uncle, a musician from the French Caribbean, instilled in her a love of both jazz and Caribbean music. Despite this, she pursued a traditional degree at Williams College in Massachusetts and moved to Seattle after graduation. Then the pandemic hit, and with plenty of time on her hands, she decided to lean into her musical side. She drew up a lengthy list of references, laid them out on mustard-colored flyers, and posted them around the Central District hoping for some bites. She found one in Pehrson, who had cut his teeth as a drummer while at college in Bellingham.

Slowly, the project snowballed. Francesca met Zora through a mutual friend; later she came across Lily in a group chat and chanced upon Arndt at a release party. Eluhu had previously retrofitted her garage into a space for musical improv, and as she graciously invited people over to her place to jam, a collective began to form. The band played their first show at a Central District block party next to Lily’s house sometime around the latter half of 2021, when the first round of COVID vaccinations allowed people to reconvene more comfortably in public spaces. Soon after they held court at Cafe Racer’s newly-reopened Capitol Hill location.

Then, suddenly, the band’s foundation would face its first test when Lily decided to move to San Diego. After living in Seattle for ten years, she hadn’t yet found a sense of community to ground her. The band lamented her departure but carried on anyway, continuing to build a musical rapport with each other while adding saxophonist XIa to the mix, after her performance at a post-Factory Luxe jam dropped jaws.

In the interim, they kept their bond with Lily intact - Francesca had even taken the time to fly out to San Diego for an impromptu visit. When hard times fell, Lily felt herself being drawn back to Seattle, and she nonchalantly asked Thomas if the band was still practicing at Eluhu’s space.

LILY
I came to this garage door
unannounced
no one knew I was in town
I started listening and
they were playing a new song -
I was like
Oh, that’s good -
and I waited for them to finish the song and I was like
WOOOOOOO!

The reunion took the group entirely by surprise. Banging on the garage door and cheering, they welcomed her back with open arms. It was a critical moment for Lily, having recently transitioned, but it was an equally critical moment for the band; their first single, the sultry “Feeling You,” had featured her as a co-writer, and they were planning on hiring a session keyboardist in her absence. Lily’s rearrival proved something to everybody, something that nobody could quite yet place about the group; the bonds between its members had become substantial, not so easily eradicated. They would continue on together.

Every moment I'm always so thankful to be in this project. Sometimes one or two things will mess with us or, you know, not everything always goes according to the plan, but whenever those things happen I always just think, "I'm in this fucking band.” So shit, I mean, how bad can it be?

-Zora Seboulisa

While Day Soul Exquisite is somewhat directed by Eluhu, its vision comes from a conjunction of its elements, comprised of a plethora of diverse backgrounds, identities, and skill sets. Many of its members play multiple instruments, though those hidden talents tend to surface during jams, to the pleased chagrin of the others. Lily plays bass in the band on top of keys, but made the conscious decision to switch to these instruments after having played drums in all her previous bands. Thomas lays down upright bass and vocal harmonies on top of tons of percussion through their solo project, Another Magic.

Zora, meanwhile, isn’t just the band’s main bassist - she’s a slam poet who competed in high school at the national level. That background infiltrates the songwriting process, where she and Francesca will occasionally collaborate on lyrics from their dual approaches.

ZORA (on Brave New Voices)
It's a crazy environment.
The thing is
you go and you're just
surrounded
by a bunch of other poets
who are also teenagers.
Nobody sleeps.
You're there for four days
and sometimes you hear
Somebody's having a cipher over there!
What time?
It starts at three!
You get up at nine and go to your first bout.
It's just really cool.

From a recording standpoint, the band is only three songs deep, each of them bridging the gap between jazz structures and an R&B aesthetic amid Eluhu’s elastic, bilingual vocals. They’re also each compellingly itinerant, zigging and zagging across unexpected chord progressions and dynamics across their runtimes. That throughline foreshadows the improv-led direction the band is taking for their future output: an upcoming EP, tracked at SODO’s Mysterious Red X and planning to be released in the fall. It’s all early steps for La fem Records, an LLC founded by Eluhu that currently houses both Day Soul Exquisite’s music and that of her eponymous solo project.

FRANCESCA
That was always my dream
to start a record label
and I didn't know that
I would wanna be one of the musicians
on it.
I'm really hoping to create
an artist collective
that's super supportive and helps people get funding
with an LGBTQ, BIPOC focus.
I think that'd be super powerful.

Her intentions with the label reflect the reality of the band’s existence, who find their strength within the space they carve for themselves amid a period of reinvigorated racist and anti-trans sentiment across America. Songs like “Abattoir” and “Fuck Off” are adept at investigating injustice, but that intention comes secondary to the act of keeping their bonds taut, elastic, like a friendship bracelet. Somebody might come in with some lyrics, or somebody might come in with a melody, but the band makes sure to approach each task from an insistently democratic approach. The music happens to be a blessed by-product - what Josh jokingly refers to as “Seattle heist” music. You can hear the result with your own ears.

It also seems to be working for them, significantly. Since that first show at the Central District block party, the band has started to play everywhere, from hidden house shows to the city’s festival stages. Over the coming months, they’ll be at Bite of Seattle, Folklife, Freakout, Timber, and tons of individual shows in the interim. Their relentless live appearances have made it so that you’re destined to witness their on-stage chemistry at some point - where, as the band itself attests, their spirit truly coalesces.

JOSH
When we get on stage
we're really just playing for each other
and just having fun
and listening.
It's really cool to have an opportunity like this.

LILY
We really do it for each other.
It's remarkable
because we've played
so many shows
and it almost doesn't matter
how many people are there
what the room is
what the reception is like
because I totally forget.

*to Josh*
I'm just locked into you
and every little thing you do
that tickles my ears.

PHOTO BY LILY WENBAO.