Jasper Llewellyn

Jasper Llewellyn is a cofounder of caroline, the British band that mixes post-rock, chamber music, and a deep love of international folk music with ideas about how to subvert the act of being a band, how to make the entire enterprise a little more precarious. “caroline could also exist as something other than a band,” Llewellyn once said in an interview. “It’s an art project, and it could be expressed in other ways.” Indeed, Llewellyn’s interests are far beyond the scope of just a band. In 2023, he attained his doctorate, having studied and practiced the ways in which improvisation shows up in performance art and how it increases the capacity of the person performing. His own performance art has included long walks in London rivers and mudlarking along their banks, soaking his guitars in their water and playing them beneath their bridges. He has done Duchamp-like installations of art objects and played percussion and cello to spoken-word poetry. He is also a practicing Buddhist, working now on ordination.

In August 2026, Llewellyn offered the first glimpse of his solo LP with “For the Teacher,” a brilliant song that combines several of those interests. For the first two minutes, over halting piano, his voice cracking into falsetto, he sings a scene of curious domestic tranquility, lyrics borrowed from his Buddhist teacher, Maitreyabandhu. In the second act, as drums drift at his back, Llewellyn and a second vocalist sing separate verses, requiring you to pull the threads apart yourself. “Sometimes I pretend like I don’t feel like I’m no use,” they harmonize together toward the end, above a glorious post-folk-rock crescendo. “For the Teacher” is a twisting anthem about believing you can be something more, about learning to believe that.