A positive mix of feeling and ferocity

Imaad Wasif writes songs to lift up others

"It's much more of a spiritual role that I feel like I'm pursuing in music," says Imaad Wasif.

LOS ANGELES - "This is all life, and this is all love," singer-songwriter Imaad Wasif says between songs during an afternoon set at the Little Radio warehouse space in mid-June. Like Wasif's music, the statement is deliberate yet utterly sincere.

Wasif conveys remarkable dignity onstage, given how slight he looks thrashing around with his guitar and the outrageousness of the scene around him. Hosted by Little Radio, a forward-thinking Internet radio station/recording studio/live venue, the show could be a photo shoot for an American Apparel ad. Bikini-clad hipster girls and their mop-topped dates drink Colt 45 and drip water onto the floor, having left the waterslide outside at the sound of Wasif and his backing band Two Part Beast.

The audience crowds in, captivated as epic riffs part to reveal gorgeous melodies and reflective lyrics. Melancholic ballad "Oceanic" and mystical rocker "Unveiling" mix feeling and ferocity in a way that brings to mind Jimi Hendrix and Neil Young. It's a powerful performance, but Wasif is not here just to entertain. "It's much more of a spiritual role that I feel like I'm pursuing in music," Wasif says at his home a few days before the show.

It's no surprise that Wasif, who plays at the Milky Way on Sunday, is a masterful and mindful performer given the devotion he has brought to a variety of projects during the past decade. His new album, "Strange Hexes," recorded with Two Part Beast and self-released in March, is fierce and elegant, a blast of post-modern psychedelic rock that is a powerful testament to Wasif's passion for pushing boundaries. His sound has grown in vastness since the self-titled solo acoustic album he released on Kill Rock Stars in 2006, back when he was a touring guitarist and support act for the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.

Prior to going solo, Wasif helmed revered indie-rock bands lowercase and Alaska! Lou Barlow was such a fan of Wasif and his music that he invited both bands to tour with him for years and asked Wasif to play in the Folk Implosion and on his solo albums, including the one he's now recording.

"He's just relentless," Barlow says. "He actually climbs into things and figures them out. And what comes out, it could only come out of him. It's not like a style or a thing that's cut and paste. It's just very thoughtful."

Wasif first took up music when he was 14 as a defense while coming of age in the Coachella Valley near Palm Springs, Calif. He describes feeling discrimination toward his immigrant family, who are Indian, and wanting a way to escape. "I was really seeking to find something that could be more of a shield . . . in the environment I was growing up in. And then I started to realize, through that, I didn't necessarily need to hide behind that. It became almost more of a way of helping me to express things that I couldn't normally express in my day-to-day relationships and interactions with people."

Wasif's early music was very angry and, he now feels, irresponsible. In his new songs, he consciously puts forth a positive message and strives to continue the tradition of spiritual and artistic searching he admires in both music and literature, including his particular favorite, French Surrealist Gérard de Nerval. "A song to me, it's something that is really a part of a collective unconscious," he says.

By devoting himself to his craft, Wasif is not only pursuing what he sees as his life's work. He is also making music to sustain others, as music has done for him.

"I want to be able to connect to a spiritual lifting within people," he says. "Within my own world, I feel a lot of sadness, and it's hard for me to imagine that's not experienced by everybody on some level. I don't want to come across like I've got some kind of martyrdom about it, but I really do believe that music can save people."