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Sontag Shogun : Patterns For Resonant Space（to be released on 22 September, 2017）
The beautiful soundscape which can take your mind off the ordinary days.
In 2014, the New York-based avant‐garde modern-classical ambient trio, Sontag Shogun debuted by releasing the first album 'Tale' which has the beauty and the darkness of artists such as Sigur Rós and Jóhann Jóhannsson. And now, after about three years, we'll release the second album 'Patterns For Resonant Space' made of a combination of lovely piano, ambient-edited vocals, analog and digital electronics, and daily necessaries such as rice, chopsticks, and spoon.
During this period, they have shared the stage with notable artists such as Hauschka who is a popular modern-classical pianist, Julia Kent who is the cellist of Antony & the Johnsons that is also famous for the collaborator of Björk, and also played concerts at Frameworks Festival in Germany and The Museum Of Modern Art in New York. After many concers in North America, Western Europe, Northern Europe, and East Asia, they created the surpassing beautiful second studio album like ones of Sigur Rós and Jóhann Jóhannsson. The fantastic sound has also been praised by Pitchfork Media.
For this album, David Bryant who is the member of Godspeed You! Black Emperor joined as the recording engineer at the studio in Canada. As is the case with the first album, Giuseppe Ielasi took charge of the mastering works. These facts guarantee clearly that the album sound quality is wonderful.
Please place yourself deeper in Sontag Shogun's new sound created by mixing lush piano melodies, with an electric sound to colour their quiet world, and vocals that engage the heart and mind of all listeners.
Sontag Shogun songs are like environments to float through, lost in hushed wonder. An insectile fragility informs the music that this Brooklyn-based trio has released since its 2011 debut. Ian Temple’s curious, painterly piano—think Erik Satie or George Gershwin—grounds the aesthetic, while Jeremy Young and Jesse Perlstein tremor the balance with filmic samples and carefully skewered tapes. By 2012’s Absent Warrior, Abandoned Battlefield and 2014’s Tale, they’d stirred a variety of voices into the mix to haunting effect, and they had become adept at conjuring an evocative sense of place—a factory floor, a choir rehearsal, a public square—and triggering hazy nostalgia. Experiencing “Paper Canes” or the cosmic-mosaic “Hungarian Wheat” can feel like being the subject of an expressive August Macke watercolor before the brush’s work is even done.
Gentler than its predecessors, Patterns for Resonant Space threatens to crumble at a touch. Melting easily into one another, these 10 mostly brief songs spotlight field-recorded crackle and reversed piano tracks. The band often seems to be caught in the act of simultaneously disassembling and reassembling its own dreamed-in compositions. To tag along is to drift, to engage Sontag Shogun’s acts of reinvention. Piano remains their constant. The brisk, nagging ivories on “no.10 (£20,000)” competes, gamely, with disorienting whirrs, storm gusts, and random radio bursts. Gurgling drains and a cut-up announcer’s voice—“they’ve got different speeds,” it observes—lunge at the hopeful, resolute motifs that guide “no.17 (Chopsticks, Motor, Lecture).” Leading with unsettling sounds that land somewhere between hot oil and a bristling rattlesnake, “no.19 (Patient Elegy for Bernr’d Hoffmann)” stumbles into staggered chords as stratospherically exquisite as the wordless vocal harmonies that follow.
Patterns turns abstract at moments, showcasing a more ambitious Sontag Shogun—as on “no.4 (Sonar),” with its reverb-drenched drones and ink-blot organs. “no.16 (Windmill)” suggests a calliope organ being tuned in the path of a steam locomotive. The organic/artificial frisson at play on “no.2 (Music Box)”—a searching, tentative piano versus the sprained whinges of a manipulated music box—places it among the most surprising and satisfying entries in the band’s oeuvre.
Yet the album’s masterstroke is its longest and most conventional offering. The meditative “no.8 (Leaves like Photographs)” blends patient piano plinks and delicate trills with backwards versions of the same, until melodies and countermelodies blur, shimmering almost psychedelically. Before the song spindles out in a warped, choral wheeze, a woman’s voice emerges from the din. “Leaves are photographs, they’re light-sensitive materials; as they change color, the results are the same,” she explains. “It’s a reaction that happens with the silver nitrate, that’s why it changes color—you can think of green as being the white paper, when it’s exposed to light.” This is Patterns for Resonant Space in a nutshell—a slippery record that’s never the same twice, always evolving to reveal something new.
Pitchfork Media
| 1. no.13 (Sushi Rice, AM Frequency Gap, Pines) | Ian Temple: Piano | |
| 2. no.9 (Barricade Bleu) | Jeremy Young: Tapes, Oscillators, Amplified Objects and Surfaces | |
| 3. no.5 (Melt Canyon) | Jesse Perlstein: Vocals, Field Recordings, Electronic Processing, Turntable | |
| 4. no.19 (Patient Elegy for Bernr'd Hoffmann) | ||
| 5. no.4 (Sonar) | Guest Musician | |
| 6. no.2 (Music Box) | Sam Ackerley: Chatter on "no.8" | |
| 7. no.16 (Windmill) | ||
| 8. no.17 (Chopsticks, Motor, Lecture) | ||
| 9. no.10 (￡20,000) | ||
| 10. no.8 (Leaves Like Photographs) |
| All tracks composed by Ian Temple, Jeremy Young, Jesse Perlstein |
| Recorded by David Bryant at The Pines in Montreal |
| Mixed by Sontag Shogun |
| Mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi |
| Photo by Takahiro Kido |
| Art Direction and Design by Takahiro Kido |
| Released by Ricco Label |
VIDEOS
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| no.4 (Sonar) |
FREE DOWNLOAD (mp3/320kbps)
| no.2 (Music Box) |
| https://riccolabel.bandcamp.com/track/no-2-music-box |
Online Store
| http://www.fleursy.com/riccolabel/store.html |
BandCamp
| https://riccolabel.bandcamp.com/album/patterns-for-resonant-space |
