Sontag Shogun are a New York based neo-classical ambient music trio who express an individualistic beauty featuring a combination of lovely piano melodies, ambient, analog musical electronics such as a tape machines, modular synthesizers, sound effects made from everyday items such as rice, chopstick and spoons, and edited vocals like clean air.
In 2014, they debuted by releasing their first album ‘Tale', a masterpiece featuring beautiful songs and its overwhelmed sound quality. They have shared the stage with notable artists such as Hauschka who is a popular modern-classical pianist, Julia Kent, the cellist of Antony & the Johnsons who is also know for her collaborations with Björk, and also played concerts at Frameworks Festival in Germany and The Museum Of Modern Art in New York. After many concerts in North America, Western Europe, Northern Europe, and East Asia, they created the surpassing beautiful second studio album 'Patterns For Resonant Space' like ones of Sigur Rós and Jóhann Jóhannsson in 2017. The fantastic sound has also been praised by Pitchfork Media.
In 2019, they released their third album 'It Billows Up' made from field recordings, analog oscillator, foley sounds, and a piano then, in 2020, their fourth album 'The Floating World & The Sorrowful World' featuring improvisation performance with a Belgium-based guitarist and tape manipulator, Stijn Hüwels.
In 2022, they released their first collaboration album, 'Valo Siroutuu' by Sontag Shogun and a Finnish female vocalist, Lau Nau, aka Laura Naukkarinen, a singer-songwriter who works using both acoustic and electronic instruments, from traditional instruments and singing voice to analogue synthesisers and field recordings.
“There’s a tangible loneliness to Sontag Shogun's music, but there's a wistful loveliness present, too. The Brooklyn trio assumes a sort of songwriting assembly line, with Ian Temple's emotive, tremulous piano figures falling prey to Jesse Perlstein's legion of atmospheric, laptop-catalogue samples and the oscillator/tapes/electronic militia at Jeremy Young's command. Borne thereof are instrumentals that hover somewhere between quiet-storm raucous and New Age quiescent: giggly ivory-tickles brush elbows with industrial found sounds; funny-bone effects trill like cicadas or fireworks or distant slide whistles; sonatas and pitch-shifted drones suck face. Unlikely antecedents turn up in this mournful and meditative melee (The band counts composers like Arvo Part, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Philip Glass, and Max Richter among their influences.) Perhaps it's just that they seem to, for succumbing to a Sontag Shogun song is like wandering into a mist or thinny in a mystery novel: the first few seconds are universally objective, but beyond that, the experience is colored by what the listener brings to the table.”
-Ray Cummings, Village Voice
PHOTOS
VIDEOS
The Musk Ox | Jubokko |
No.4 (Sonar) | Live at Elsewhere |