Pennsylvania-based visual artist and musician Brandon Locher shares Rahu Ketu and its companion EP, The Shadow Planets, his first recordings in six years. Rahu Ketu also marks Locher’s debut full-length album under his own name. Across both releases, Locher redefines his craft in rhythmic, cinematic sound design, informed by a love of ambient composition, library music, trip-hop, and experimental sound collage. A dedicated practitioner of Transcendental Meditation, Locher’s work is deeply rooted in introspection, process, and a meditative approach to creativity. By tuning his daily practice to freeform, focused music-making, aligned with concepts of Vedic astrology, he’s found not only a fascinating new chapter within his oeuvre but also a framework for where to go from here.

Raised in Johnstown, Locher spent seven years in New York City before returning to rural Pennsylvania in 2020, where he established a simpler lifestyle and home studio practice. Known for nuanced and immersive drawings, the self-taught artist has thrived in the details over the last decade, amassing a catalog of commissioned visual work, from collaborations with Ghostly International to a recent installation with Aimée Portioli (Grand River). Locher’s art has been featured in publications such as High-Fructose, Vice, and Tiny Mix Tapes, and archived on UbuWeb, affirming his place within the contemporary avant-garde. His website chronicles over 20 years of work, archiving his artistic evolution as he shapeshifts through various modes of expression.

Whether working with colored pencils, monochromatic ink, or the waveforms of his Ableton keyboard and sequencer setup, Locher’s process relies on intuition, freedom, and constraints. Over time, meditation and his study of Advaita Vedanta began informing the daily structure of his artistic practice. “What fascinated me about Vedic astrology wasn't prediction so much as the idea of time and cycles,” he explains. “So when I looked at my own birth chart, I realized that the next period I was entering was Rahu Ketu, a 264-day cycle from September 2025 through May 2026.” As someone who works best within set parameters, he saw the period as a temporal boundary for recording an album, with plans to remain in sync with subsequent cycles.

Further, he devised a symbolic system that shaped both the music and its titles. In Vedic astrology, a Mahadasha is a major planetary period that shapes an individual’s life over several years, and the Antardasha is a sub-period within it, reflecting more specific themes and energies. Inspired, he sought to translate these lived astrological influences into music, using the alphabet as a symbolic framework, deliberately omitting the letters that spell 'Rahu Ketu,' creating a track list of linguistic eclipse that mirrors the shadow planets themselves. The EP, recorded during the same period as the LP, includes the omitted letters, along with remixes by Salvatore Mercatante and Sam Prekop.

Beyond the conceptual framing, the resulting music is both thrilling and hypnotic, built on a mix of organic and synthetic instrumentation. Songs brim with dizzying percussive loops and climactic swoops. Entirely self-produced and performed, the music often feels inhabited by ensembles moving through intricate mazes of sound. “B-C” vibrates with rumbling horns and strings. On “F-G”, somber keys and trumpet meet for a slow march, heightened by drums in the dramatic final pass. “J” is marked by celestial hums; “Q” grooves with vibraphone tones. Album centerpiece “O-P” carries a sense of lowlit mystery. He explains, “My sister and I watched Un flic, a 1972 crime film. The next day, in the back of my mind, I was like, ‘I'll try to make some imaginary French noir music.’”

Emerging from a slow and steady 264-day routine, the 97 minutes of music collected across Rahu Ketu and The Shadow Planets, are the first dispatch from what Locher considers a lifelong musical project and cosmic audio autobiography. He likens it to a reductive sculpture, in which an artist essentially frees the shape hidden within the mass. “You're chiseling away a little bit every single day; then eventually you're gonna have something you've made.” With more auditory shapes to come in Locher’s ambitious musical vision, the first is a worthy space to live in for a while.