2024, Muzan Editions
“Fallen” is a collaboration between Jesse Perlsteitn & Shinya Sugimoto. It is there follow-up from their 2019 release (I Confess) also put out on cassette by Muzan Editions. While touring on that release, they decided to go into the studio and lay down a version of their touring set. After a pandemic-cancelled tour, they returned to Los Angeles & Osaka respectively, and spent the last few years passing the recordings back and forth, adding, subtracting, finessing and, in a sense, updating the music to reflect the times/experiences they were having.
FALLEN is a long-form piece broken into four parts that tells a story of change, of love found and lost. Using soundscapes taken from our travels, voicemails, conversations about loss and love, and adding lamenting vocals, noise and piano, this album encapsulates the distance between people, both geographic and emotionally, and the delicate passage of time.
2023, Ululations
This an experimentation for me...an attempt to make short pieces fit for meditation and sleep that are more structured and song-like. Each piece was pared with a field recording I thought already possessed a meditative quality and found music to write to it.
2023, Cudighi Records
Lost On The Dance Floor is derived from a two-hour improvisational session that was segmented and minimally edited to turn fluid ideas into unique song-like structures that straddle the genres of industrial techno, ambient, electro-pop, noise, etc. The trio, a collaboration between Jesse Perlstein (Abandoned Battlefields), Daniel Sparks (Omniscuro), and Erick Eiser (Hornsbee), represents a musical alchemy achieved through connection and experimentation and continued evolution.
2023, Ululations
This EP is a meditation split into two tracks, mixing field recordings, voice and synth, in slow, building loops, I emulate my live sound in this restrained piece, performed in my studio in Los Angeles. This is the first release under my new moniker, Abandoned Battlefields.
2022, self-released (songs composed for podcast)
I was asked by Meadowlark Media to score their investigative journalism series MOMA. A follow-up to Sara Ganim’s Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting on Jerry Sandusky’s sexual abuse of minors, this heartbreaking tale follows Shawn Sinisi, one of Sandusky’s victims, as his life is changed forever and his harrowing descent into opiod addiction, rehabilitation and his untimely demise. The story focuses on family, the opioid crisis and the problematic rehabilitation industry.
You can listen to the podcast on all the usual channels or HERE.
2022, self-released (songs composed for podcast)
I was asked by iHeartRadio & Neon Hum Media to compose for their investigative journalism/true crime podcast mini-series Sympathy Pains. I created the theme and fifteen additional tracks to score the story produced by Natalie Rinn & reported Laura Beil, about a woman who feigned illnesses to get attention and affection from strangers.
You can listen to the podcast on all the usual channels or HERE.
2022, Beacon Sound
Valo Siroutuu ("The Light Scatters") is a collaborative song cycle written on and for the island of Kimitoön, Finland. Incorporating in-situ field recordings, impromptu outdoor songwriting, contemplative and patient chamber arrangements and lyrics delivered both in Finnish and English, the album thematically pursues observations of and meditations on place, time, nature, home, play, and language. Less a record of songs and more a continued, braided rope of ephemeral moments and turbid musical events, this work exists in a suspended dream or flow state, billowing up momentarily like wind breezing through spruce leaves or cresting over like the initial breaking waves of an oncoming high tide, yet always eventually rippling out back into quietude and solace like the patient floating fractures of light scattered across water's surface.
Recorded in Kimito, Finland in 2019, with overdubs and arrangements produced in Montreal, New York, and Los Angeles in 2020; released April 8, 2022 on Beacon Sound.
2022, Flag Day Recordings
"Flutter & Scrape" is a walking performance for prepared piano, aleatorically prepared room & objects, sine & square wave oscillators, tapes, voice, EMF signal, & time-based electronics.
credits
released January 7, 2022 on Flag Day Recordings
Performed by Sontag Shogun in 2018 in the studio at Machines With Magnets, recorded by Seth Manchester. Electronics & processing done in Montreal & Brooklyn in 2019.
2021, self-released (songs composed for podcast)
I was asked by producer Aliya Pabani to score her first seasons of We Are Not The Virus, a podcast that covers the history and current issues around houselessness and tent encampments of Toronto.
You can listen to the podcast on all the usual channels or HERE.
2020, self-released (songs composed for podcast)
I was asked by Neon Hum Media to sound design the first season of their investigative journalism/true crime podcast series Smoke Screen. I created a bevy of tracks to score the story told by reporter Alex Schuman regarding the exploits of a con artist who masqueraded as a priest (and still does). It’s a great story and has a lot of heart, humor, darkness and humanity.
You can listen to the podcast on all the usual channels or HERE.
2020, self-released (short film score)
The Backward Astronomer is a contemporary love story involving America’s class divide and a portal to the moon. Jake Nelson directs and animates the film uniquely with a process involving creating 3D animation as a guide, and then hand drawing in pencil on paper over 7,000 frames. The style was developed specifically for this film. Jade Shames (the writer of the film) asked me to collaborate on the score back in 2018. and I was recently commissioned to remix one of the tracks for the release, which coincides with it’s public release as a Vimeo Staff Pick (it had previously only been viewable at festivals. The music is comprised of a world that shifts in and out of a surreal existence brought on by love. In the brief 10 minutes of the film we soar through the air in a convertible (transformed by a sail), into a high-society party, to a posh nightclub, to a surreal expedition to the moon through an urban cellar hatch, to an existential time-dimensional shift.
2019, Muzan Editions (JP)
“I Confess”, a collaborative work by Jesse Perlstein (Sontag Shogun; US) & Shinya Sugimoto (JP) sees both artists, after performing live together on many occasions, combining their musical forces for the first time on an official recording. Perlstein, responsible for tape manipulation and field recordings and piano virtuoso Sugimoto, have created a sonic adventure, initially leading us through a wide range of disparate urban environments with their seemingly endless cacophony. Halfway through we escape the concrete jungle, searching for a way to put our mind at ease. While being surrounded by the soothing sound of nature itself that lets us dwell in a well-deserved moment of contemplation, Perlstein’s haunting voice and Sugimoto’s subtle piano play enter the scene, just to make way for the listener to get caught up in a final maelstrom of swirling tapestries of sound.
2019 Beacon Sound (US)
This album is about slow change, forced change, and longing for what we may have left behind in the process of change.
Floréal combines recordings made all over the spatial/temporal map. "Photographs" and "Floréal" were recorded by Seth Manchester at Machines With Magnets in Pawtucket during the It Billows Up sessions in February 2018. "Plaid Lines" was recorded by the band in their home studios in Montreal and Queens in 2019. "Lament" was recorded by John Hull in Greenwich and assembled by Scott Solter in Durham in 2016.
2019, Youngbloods (US)
“Embedding classical-tinged piano and wordless vocals within a thick mass of electronics and field recordings makes the group's sound instantly identifiable and goes a long way towards distinguishing a fully realized recording such as this one.” - Textura
“The open-ended nature of a sonic tapestry is fertile ground for contemplation. On It Billows Up, humanity meets the rest of nature and is given a musical score: disparate forces forming a fragile harmony." - A Closer Listen
2017, Home Normal (JP)
'An utterly affectionate and adorable aural apparition, ‘the things we let fall apart’ emerging frosted and fragile, delicately sculptured in thawing ice tones, the symphonics delicately shy eyed and whispered are breathlessly beguiled by a graceful neo classical hush, the effect really is entrancing as it is teasingly brief, sitting somewhere between a very youthful Mum and Smile Down Upon Us. ‘thunderswan’ over on the flip is expressed with the kind of poise and musical poetry that shimmers and twinkles to those early post YMO outings from Ryuichi Sakamoto, its minimal toning sweetly gathering to blossom into caressing cinematic crushes dappled in surrendering sepia hazes, a most exquisite and rarefied thing of bewitching beauty.' - The Sunday Experience (Mark Losing Today)
2017, Youngbloods (US) // Ricco Label (JP)
"Gentler than its predecessors, Patterns for Resonant Space threatens to crumble at a touch. Melting easily into one another, these 10 mostly brief songs spotlight field-recorded crackle and reversed piano tracks. The band often seems to be caught in the act of simultaneously disassembling and reassembling its own dreamed-in compositions." - Raymond Cummings on Pitchfork
2016, Palaver Press (US)
A documentation of our 2015 performances (specifically what we had prepared for our 2015 Asian Tour and a good example of our evolution from previous recorded material.
Recorded at Le Poisson Rouge, NYC in 2015 by Irene Trudel for WQXR / Q2 Music.
2014, Palaver (US) // Ricco Label (JP)
Sontag Shogun’s immense debut full-length album, “Tale”, compiles three years worth of composing and directed textural improvising, molded into nine concise musical statements. They have been experimenting with songform and traversing nostalgic emotional territories, quietly honing their craft alongside collaborators across disciplines such as video, film, dance, performance and poetry. Primarily making use of a grand piano, field recordings, tapeloops and digitally treated vocals, the trio has discovered a unique niche that straddles identifiable genre boundaries. Repetitions of phrases, digitally glitched-out melodies, superimposing practice takes with studio takes. Call this album modern classical, ambient, new age, Sontag prefers their own nomenclature: lullanoise.
2013, Palaver (US)
Sontag Shogun's EP preceding their debut full-length. Featuring a wide scope of their compositional styles, from minimal "pop" vocal heart-break lament "Let the Flies In" to the scattered sonic postcard "Gekheid Op Een Stokje". It is also the first work they had pressed to vinyl in a compact 10" format.
2013, Palaver (US)
A small collection of works recorded and edited between 2010 and 2013, bundled for Palaver's digital-only releases. A "solo" release that features prominently violinist HUNTER JACK (of CLOUD BECOMES YOUR HAND, [the] SLOWEST RUNNER [IN ALL THE WORLD]).
2010
Sontag Shogun's beginnings were lodged in a progressive post-rock sextet that explored the landscape of instrumental music. Influenced by bands like Godspeed, You Black Emperor, Mono and Explosions in the Sky. This is their only studio album and reached some critical cult acclaim before disbanding the same year it was released.
Finish Him by Liam Singer, released 13 July 2018 1. Nest of Nerves 2. Offering 3. Test Tone 4. Until I Fall 5. 'The Gambrels Of The Sky' 6. Apollo 7. Love Me Today 8. The Devil 9. Bending Away (Remove Your Mind) 10. Down, Down, Down 11. Protection Poem 12.
2018, BirdWatcher Records
The unparalleled talent known as Liam Singer asked me to fill out his live band while workshopping the songs for Finish Him back in 2015. Three years later the songs were finally released in the shape of a beautiful, daring album where chamber-pop meets electro-noise. A very cool project that I am happy to be a part of. My favorite track is “The Devil”.
Contributed to Jeremy Young's "The Chants Beneath Project", 2015
The Chants Beneath Project is a living archive of newly commissioned sound works for 120 international sonic artists, each based on a unique single edition doublesided cassette-tape loop cut from Jeremy Young's 50-minute piece entitled, "Chants Beneath The Bed Of The Furnace Brook". These works are not for sale (except should the artists choose to release them) but will forever be freely available for listening. I was asked (by Jeremy) to contribute a track using the tape loop he sent to me and I came up with a meditative, chanty, psychedelic sound collage.
2015, Obsolete Media Objects
My dear friend and collaborator Lauren E. Walker released a tape of tracks she had worked on for a few years and we produced a track together during our time in Seoul. It is a simple thing but was the beginning of both of our urges to tour and collaborate more and outside our comfort zone. Listen to her amazing band NICE LEGS and tell me she is not the greatest thing on feet.