Sontag Shogun - It Billows Up

Release Date:05/24/2019;Notes:Vinyl LP pressing. Brooklyn-based experimental trio Sontag Shogun present their multimedia project and third full length album It Billows Up. Whereas Sontag Shogun's critically acclaimed 2017 album Patterns for Resonant Space was an experiment in reverse-engineering and overdubbing improvised compositions, It Billows Up is a linear, continuous narrative featuring ambient meshes of layered field recordings, analog oscillators, foley, and improvised piano. With Ian Temple's painterly piano, Jesse Perlstein's cascade of haunted vocals and found sounds, and Jeremy Young's intricate manipulation of tapes and kitchen utensils, It Billows Up pieces together sounds of our waking life by crafting thick barricades of meditative, interwoven sonic collages. The familiar notes of wet footsteps, gray clouds, perplexing rants of passersby, and purring motors of oncoming traffic confidently survey the outskirts of the album, each sound dripping with sparse piano melodies and drifting into it's own grainy mist of synesthesia.