Patrick Shiroishi - Glass House (2024) [Hi-Res]

The arduous build of the nearly 16-minute opening track on Patrick Shiroishi's Glass House is driven by many factors. Creeping synth and clock ticks are the first sensations, but the track contains multitudes of background noise: filling glasses, dishes clattering, a storm rumbling while rain hits the roof, children, phones, mixers—even a cat makes a brief appearance as if to say "don't forget about me, I'm alive!" The ambient, found sound track surveys loud mundanity before Shiroishi's saxophone—the instrument he is most known for—finally cuts the loud silence after 11 minutes. By song's end, he's broken out into layered sax wails interrupted by a clanging landline phone that drops us into the rest of the record.

It would be easy to take these songs at face value—one song about preparing a meal does not invoke a story. Shiroishi's work often employs field recordings and room sounds as instruments and Glass House is hardly a diamond in the rough for it. The difference-making, specialized work here relies on his swirling of instrumentation above the fray, as if his main point is to prove that no matter the surrounding ballyhoo, he masters his domain. In a way, Glass House presents a day in the life. Opener "memories (i am in the vortex)" is merely prep work for a party to come.

"what I do next makes no sense at all" builds a tantalizing synth line over a chorus of loud talkers while a bludgeoning drum fill moves the song toward a defining piano-synth crescendo. When it abruptly ends, Shiroishi acknowledges the madness with an oceanic wind and piano comedown on "the procession." That song's elegiac rise reminds the listener that the fullest days can always descend into the loneliness of one's thoughts. As the piano thickens, the ambience builds as quietly as a response to someone who has long left the party but still resonates in the mind.

The closing track, starting as a delightfully stark and provoking piece with swelling strings, takes a heel turn at the near-halfway mark. The ticking clock has returned before the changeover with a creeping sense that this day in the life has turned sour. After all the preparations and noise, all the din and clamor, the welter of the day weighs heavily on our narrator. As with so much of Shiroishi's work, the song turns to a path to relaxation. The heavy breath of socialization now gone from the ear, we are free to remember what we did and why it was so important. Shiroishi's eyes and ears worked in tandem to convey to the listener the peaks and valleys of existence and that's why he is a special conductor of ambient-jazz whirlwind in an era where the genre could just as easily be AI-approximated shlock. © Jeffery Laughlin

Tracklist:
1-1. Patrick Shiroishi - memories (i am in the vortex) (15:55)
1-2. Patrick Shiroishi - what i do next makes no sense at all (05:26)
1-3. Patrick Shiroishi - the procession (05:18)
1-4. Patrick Shiroishi - someday you'll wake up. and you just won't feel like playing anymore // why not? i say (09:00)