I WAS TOO YOUNG TO HEAR SILENCE – Patrick Shiroishi

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Saxophone (+ glockenspiel) in a parking garage should not be this stunning but I can’t stop obsessing over the magic Shiroishi creates here. Makes me think of what Sonny Rollins's days of woodshedding on the Williamsburg Bridge must have sounded like:

A single saxophone, a glockenspiel, two microphones, a zoom recorder. These are the materials Patrick Shiroishi brought down with him late one night into the cavernous parking structure below a hot pot restaurant in Monterey Park. It was around 1:30AM; the spot was not too far from where Shiroishi grew up, a blank slate shown to him by his dear friend, Noah Klein. A vacant space for a new kind of collaboration—between saxophone and silence, between noise and reverberation, between negative space and self.

In a single, improvised take, Shiroishi recorded his third solo LP, I was too young to hear silence. The record plays like a stripped-down ode to its star instrument. Solo saxophone dazzles and cascades through tangible air, each note hugged and trailed by a lush, natural reverb. Each silence, of which there are many, feels deliberate, sustained, honored.