Glass House documents an exceptional, cross-media collaboration of American-Japanese, Los Angeles-based sax player-multi-instrumentalist-composer-improviser Patrick Shiroishi for the dance-theater collective Volta of choreographer Mamie Green. Glass House is a dance play about unsettling home, family and identity, issues that Shiroishi referred to many times before. The four pieces were created for specific environments and in conversations with Green and the dancers. Shiroishi used field recordings and found sounds, and played on drums, double bass, piano, keyboard, MIDI, and alto sax, and in the live performance of Glass House, he triggered pre-recorded cuts and sent saxophone cries and circular chatter into the ensemble’s eight bodies as breathy, flywheel-like exclamations.
Shiroishi used Green’s ideas for the music and adapted the music for the movement of the dancers. The outcome is suggestive and intimate, seductive and mischievous. Glass House begins with the 16-minute, ambient «memories (i am in the vortex)», slowly incorporating sonic unease and increasing tension into its ethereal narrative. The following, layered «what i do makes no sense at all» explodes with fast, uplifting joy, and evokes athletic and intertwined movements. The piano-synth-found sounds piece «the procession» is a romantic ballad that swings between motion and stasis. The closing suite «someday you’ll wake up. and you just won’t feel like playing anymore // why not? I say» is an ambitious, minimalist-chamber piece, written for harp, strings, piano, glockenspiel, and measured percussive clicks, offering a time of reflection and contemplation. This beautiful and deeply moving work uses song titles from a script by Sammy Loren and Zoey Greenwald read during the dance play.
Shiroishi, on sax and electronics, teams for a first-time performance of an ad-hoc trio with drummer-percussionist Thom Nguyen (who played before with Shoroishi in the We Bow to No Masters quartet) and guitarist Chaz Prymek (who plays with Shiroishi in the Fuubutsushi – 風物詩 – quartet), who also adds electronics to his arsenal, for a free improvised session at KOPN FM in Missouri during the Columbia Experimental Music Fest in the afternoon of early November 2021.
The two extended pieces are nuanced and rich drones that stress this trio’s immediate, emphatic and deep dynamics and phrasing dialogues. This music flows organically and gains more power and energy as it progresses, but the second piece “Same As It Always Has” is more introspective and gravitates into a powerful mode only towards its conclusion. The trio weaves beautifully the dense, soaring sax cries of Shiroishi, the spiky, effects-laden guitar work of Chaz Prymek and the textual percussive touches of Nguyen. This session went so well that the trio decided to play again the next evening. The cover artwork is by Prymek and Nguyen.
Eyal Hareuveni
Patrick Shiroishi (field recordings, drums, double bass, piano, keyboard, saxophone, electronics), Thom Nguyen (drums, percussion), Chaz Prymek (guitar, electronics)
