In 1933, musicologist John Lomax traveled through the American South in search of an exotic breed of musician. He visited prisons and back alleys and occluded little towns. He followed rumors through Louisiana backcountry and toured Texas farms that spread like enormous khaki quilts. Lomax was looking for bluesmen.

A decade or two earlier, blues had appeared in the South without obvious cause or proclamation. By the time academics like Lomax had taken notice, no one could explain exactly where the music had come from or how it had spread so thoroughly across the Southern states. None of the musicians interviewed by Lomax had been recorded before. Most of them were unknown outside of their own towns. Determined to document every musician he found, Lomax lugged a 315-pound acetate phonograph disk recorder around in his car; when he met a bluesman of merit, he would simply request a performance.

Today, in good old Brooklyn, NY, bluesman Josh Sullivan records his own music. He is, in a way, continuing Lomax’s musicological tradition, if in a conspicuously self-referential fashion. Sullivan, who performs under the name Perfvigvm, is both music maker and documentarian. He is as much interested in the substance of his music—its lyrics and instrumentation—as he is in the rawness of its recorded sound. Inspired by pre-war American recordings of blues, folk, and gospel, Sullivan aestheticizes Lomax’s work, capturing the dark, grainy quality of those early recordings and applying it to his own compositions. The result is a splendid artifact, as rare as it is public and familiar.

If you’ve ever listened to an early phonographic recording, you’ll know the sort of tinny, distant quality of sound that interests Sullivan. To replicate it the artist must improvise, using different types of equipment (old tape players, defunct speakers), sometimes recording and re-recording until the song sounds right. As Sullivan puts it, “I like to think of recording as a type of alchemy, using different combinations of things and effects, trying to get a particular sound that I have in my head.” It turns out that Sullivan’s sound may be in a lot of our heads.

Sullivan’s recording process seems less focused on nostalgic pining than on establishing a mood. Instead of simply emulating Led Belly or Geeshie Wiley, or harkening back to a low-tech time when music came directly from the folk, Sullivan summons deep emotional associations. When we listen to Perfvigvm’s rendition of “Last Kind Word Blues,” we have not only an original take on the song, but our own thoughts and feelings, linked inextricably to the experience of hearing that brooding old recording in its original. These associations, one finds, tend to be richly sad. Instead of the glow of friendly Americana, Sullivan gives us a sort of afterglow, the kind that manifests itself in the gloomier corners of the mind.

And then there’s the music itself. Most of it isn’t straight blues—it’s darker, harder, more melodic. Listen to “What God Joined Together” and its disturbing twin vocals, or “Feud in the Field,” which resembles nothing so much as European black metal, a genre that Sullivan describes as a direct influence on his own music. These tracks manage to trouble our ears at the same time as they reassure us that history and music, influence and originality, may all cohabit the same few minutes of song.

As Perfvigvm, Sullivan often records alone. Indeed, one can detect a bit of the lonely minstrel in his voice, which sometimes hides behind cloudy instrumentals, and other times shines through with verity and might. On a few tracks, he collaborates with singer Madelyn Robertson, drummer Calvin Robertson, and violist Jenny Moffett. These are particularly rich moments, when the spirit that Sullivan has worked so hard to render contemporary takes hold of more than one musician. Such tracks recall a slew of influences, from the Carter Family and Cleoma & Joseph Falcon to the early rockabilly of Elvis Presley’s Sun Studio recordings and Charlie Feathers.

Like the peripatetic bluesman of Lomax’s day, Sullivan can be difficult to track down. Primarily a recording artist, he has recently begun to play some live shows. A couple of weeks ago he performed at Williamsburg’s Epoh Owl, and before that at the Observatory, where he projected images from his blog while playing guitar and singing. Glad to have an audience, Sullivan prefers house shows—setting up in basements and backyards and playing well into the night. I suggest that you pack your phonographic recorder, take the train to Brooklyn, and find him.