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Patrick Shiroishi 2025
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Patrick Shiroishi Possesses a Gift for Improvisation » PopMatters

by jummy84
written by jummy84

In a recent interview, multi-instrumentalist and radical song form detonator Asher White stated, regarding the truly grim moment the US is experiencing right now, “There is no singular apocalypse. There’s thousands of apocalypses all over, at all time.” It’s a good summation of the permanent state of disquiet anyone with a conscience is now experiencing. While the unifying messages (and naiveté) of 60-year-old protest songs appear to be nowhere in sight, musicians are constantly using their voices and instruments to at least comment on where the country has landed.

Improvising alto saxophonist Patrick Shiroishi’s latest album, Forgetting Is Violent, offers up an unsettling example. Between his solo releases, guest appearances, and collaborations, Shiroishi‘s output is staggering. Recent albums have found him using field recordings, synths, and other effects to meditate on his Japanese-American ancestors, some of whom experienced concentration camps at the hands of a misguided US government and its race-based paranoia during World War II.

With his latest, a more collaborative effort, he has cast the net wider, making statements about the corrosive effects of American racism in general as the country plunges into authoritarianism and the ruling party holds up a recently deceased transphobe, sexist, and racist as a martyr to white grievance. So, arguably, there is a much-needed proposal for freedom in Forgetting Is Violent, but tracks such as “Mountains That Take Wing” suggest how difficult it is to obtain. His sax flutters peacefully as if in flight, only to be mauled by shards of Aaron Turner’s guitar. Shiroishi responds with warbled cries as the guitar soars on brutal, sustained notes. It is music of stark beauty, but it’s often difficult to take.

Shiroishi has acknowledged that his love of the saxophone was sparked by artists such as John Zorn. He states, he “started playing in bands with saxophone in college and diving into weirder settings. We were more into punk jazz kind of stuff.” This most certainly explains the roots of his more turbulent outpourings, or guest appearances with the likes of the all-engulfing drone monsters Water Damage, or his involvement with the Detroit-based punk band the Armed.

However, his releases, including this one, show several sides of his music. One of the album’s muted, yet perhaps most disturbing tracks, “…What Does Anyone Want But to Be a Little More Free”, features Shiroishi’s aunt recalling her first experience with racism over a dreamscape of disembodied voices, radio transmissions, and wavering, electric harmonies from Shiroishi’s alto. There’s also “Prayer for a Trembling Body”, easily the album’s most peaceful track. Here, Shiroishi’s voice whispers what might be a hymn or a thousand-year-old ballad over the sparsest of soundscapes. In some ways, it recalls the calmer music from 2024’s Glass House. 

The album is a suite of sorts, with Side One featuring the bulk of the collaborations and Side Two finding Shiroishi mostly in calmer solo waters. However, the album’s closer, “Trying to Get to Heaven Before They Close the Door”, which features guitarist Mat Ball, begins with a distant hum, perhaps a bee or a passing airplane, before a vocal line, somewhere between a howl and a sigh of relief, appears. Then the gnashing of Ball’s electric guitar enters, tumbling over and under the drone, suggesting that one can find freedom, but, like the plummeting of astronauts in a capsule re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere, it’s going to be a bumpy ride.

The song’s final moments argue that if you can handle discomfort, the payoff is worth every minute. Less ambient than 2022’s Evergreen, and not as personal as 2021’s solo saxophone LP Hidemi, Forgetting Is Violent demonstrates Patrick Shiroishi’s gift for improvisation in a variety of settings as well as his continued use of his instrument to make insistent, brave social statements.

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Patrick Shiroishi Knows How Memory Works
Music

Patrick Shiroishi Knows How Memory Works

by jummy84
written by jummy84

As a member of the hardcore outfit the Armed and the atmospheric jazz collective Fuubutsushi, Patrick Shiroishi has proven that he can handle both aggressive thrash and evocative ambience with finesse. For his latest solo project, he balances both, and creates something fraught and angry, yet strangely serene. 

Forgetting Is Violent begins with a voice speaking in Japanese. Other voices join the speaker, forming an overlapping chorus. “To protect our family names,” at first reflective, grows more urgent and insistent, one narrative turning into a litany of laments. Shiroishi enters with a rapid-fire series of chromatic high notes, all texture and tension, highlighting the rising tide of distress. Shiroishi’s sax increases with the number of voices, his frantic lines replicating, doubling and piling on top of each other via loops and delay, a method that avoids the cookie-cutter neatness of overdubs. The voices continue, but in the background, as if over a distant loudspeaker. A menacing, monolithic rumble enters, courtesy of guitar from Aaron Turner, of heavy titans Sumac and Isis. The guitar expands, obliterating the voices, but the song, instead of growing more frantic, takes shape, with a gentle but stubborn sustained tone working its way out of the chaos. 

This tone vaults us into the next track, a quiet, brooding meditation that moves in slow exhalations. Shiroishi changes his atonal hummingbird attack of the album’s first few minutes for a simple four-note melody that moves with a soothing regularity. Bolstered by guitar feedback and echoey tremolo from Turner and Gemma Thompson (Savages), “Mountains that take wing” has an immense tenderness that only increases as the guitars grow stickier and more commanding. There’s feral noise here, just as there is in “To protect our family names,” but now it’s controlled and tempered. By juxtaposing such slabs of heaviness with gestural slivers of grace, Shiroishi creates a complex narrative that feels simple, telling a powerful story in hints and implications that never overpower his eerily visceral music. 

Vocals and dialogue suggest themes without spelling them out. A song titled “…what does anyone want but to feel a little more free?” opens with a sample of someone intoning, “The world equals wilderness equals darkness equals death.” Another voice, again sounding like a loudspeaker but closer this time, speaks of “unhappy sojourners in a world of woes and wants,” while Shiroishi plays a hesitant series of warped, flutelike notes. Hymnlike vocals from Faith Coloccia set up a spoken-word section from Shiroishi’s aunt, recalling her childhood experiences with racism. Meanwhile, the song “There is no moment in my life in which this is not happening” features an incantatory call to prayer or a funeral lament, accompanied by a spectral drone and what sounds like the rattling of old teeth in a dead jaw. Toward the end, a guttural, ghostly croak manifests, and what began as a sacred ceremony now seems like an eldritch rite.

Shiroishi dials it back during the album’s second half, with a suite of four tracks held together by the sound of surf, a steady drone, solemn foghorn notes, and keening vocals. These wispy moans should sound doleful or dreary, but instead they possess a mystical illumination, like wordless koans discharged into the deep. By the time some truly gnarly guitar feedback from Mat Ball (Big Brave) arrives in the final track, what began as a descent into the maelstrom has become a testament to tranquility. If forgetting is violent, Shiroishi’s aggressive act of remembering can bring its own brutal solace.

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