The pandemic immediately cut off Patrick Shiroishi from public performance, and even in private it was nearly impossible for the Los Angeles avant-garde musician to perform with other people. This wore him down so much that by summer 2020 he was barely playing his saxophone. “I was really bummed out,” he says. “I didn’t touch my horn for two to three months.”
The quartet completed an album, titled Fuubutsushi (風物詩), with impressive speed: the recording was done within two weeks, and Sage released it in late September. On that first release, Prymek plays guitar, Jusell plays violin, Sage plays keyboard and percussion, and Shiroishi plays alto and tenor saxophones, clarinet, flute, glockenspiel, and samples; Prymek and Sage are both credited with field recordings, and everyone but Jusell adds “voice” (though there’s almost no singing—just wordless intoning here and there and a few words in Japanese on the final track). The gently rustling music explores the space between jazz-influenced instrumentals and ambient improvisations, and feels much like the performers are playing off one another on a stage.
Fuubutsushi are working on their summer album, with plans to wrap it up in June. Sage and his wife, Lynette, are also expecting their first child at the end of June, and he plans to pause all Cached activities when the baby arrives. I suspect that doesn’t include communicating with the rest of Fuubutsushi, though. “We talk every day in a group chat,” Sage says. “We’ve become best friends through this, which is so weird and cool.”
“I think sometimes the amount of gravity that people imbue into those kinds of projects is a thing that’s a lot for me to deal with as a single person running a label,” Sage says. “It was like, ‘This is a thing I’ve been working on for two and a half years, and it’s the best thing I’ve ever made, and I’m gonna give it to you to put out on your cassette label, and you’re gonna make 100 and everyone’s gonna know my tape by the end of the summer.’ And that was a lot of pressure.”
Sage had a feeling Shiroishi, Prymek, and Jusell might be up for working together, and he figured he could gel with them too—in fall 2019, he’d recruited all three to contribute to the latest M. Sage album, The Wind of Things (released in April 2021 by Geographic North).
Jusell wasn’t convinced at first that he belonged in the company of the other players, though he’s one of Sage’s longest-running collaborators. But once he came aboard, he validated Sage’s hunch. “I think Matt was feeling sorry for me, maybe, and already had this plan to record with Chaz—Lake Mary—and Patrick Shiroishi, and just asked really casually if I’d like to participate,” Jusell says. “I was intimidated, but said yes, and then it just ended up feeling incredibly easy and fun.”
