Photo: Vincent Guilbert

There’s wonderful news from Patrick Shiroishi who has announced the release of a new solo album. Entitled I Was Too Young To Hear Silence, it follows Hidemi, which was one of our 15 Album Picks of 2021, and arrives on November 10th through American Dreams. For his upcoming album, the Los Angeles-based saxophonist and composer explored Japanese free improvised, solo saxophone records. “There’s this one I found by Masayoshi Urabe, he recorded this fifty-minute or hour-long solo saxophone thing. I downloaded it, and I was skipping through it to see what it was like, and every time I clicked, it was just nothing. It was silence. And I was like…did I download the wrong thing? And then, eventually, I had time to sit and listen to it. And that really opened things up.”

An album of free improvised solo saxophone, I Was Too Young To Hear Silence was recorded in a reverberant space in a single take, allowing for the sax and silence to collude. Speaking about it, Shiroishi mentions Ma, the Japanese concept of space or negative space. “The title [I was too young to hear silence] kind of refers to when I was younger…I would fill all the space with as many notes and as loud of volume as I could,” Shiroishi explained. “Not saying that there’s any wrong way to play, but for me, after a while, I was confused with what I was trying to say.”

Shiroishi has unveiled the album’s gripping lead single, “how will we get back to life again?”, along with a music video by Nancy Kwon. Here it is.