The week’s newsletter is out, the dogchildren are fed, first 30 pages of the day read, and… I guess that’s it. A few more day schedule shifts, and I should have something approximating a proper rise to fall ratio. A pleasant freedom in operating under the mindset of having nothing to prove.

Usually a good indicator that I'm bringing a sequence in for a landing when I delete everything I'd written before – all the notes, scribbles, frustrated pissings and moanings to myself – and churn out a page of something that resembles a workable synthesis. Always seeking that balance between the work being breathless and possessed of room to breathe.

need to revisit but Fassbender brilliant

I WAS TOO YOUNG TO HEAR SILENCE – Patrick Shiroishi

Saxophone (+ glockenspiel) in a parking garage should not be this stunning but I can’t stop obsessing over the magic Shiroishi creates here. Makes me think of what Sonny Rollins's days of woodshedding on the Williamsburg Bridge must have sounded like:

A single saxophone, a glockenspiel, two microphones, a zoom recorder. These are the materials Patrick Shiroishi brought down with him late one night into the cavernous parking structure below a hot pot restaurant in Monterey Park. It was around 1:30AM; the spot was not too far from where Shiroishi grew up, a blank slate shown to him by his dear friend, Noah Klein. A vacant space for a new kind of collaboration—between saxophone and silence, between noise and reverberation, between negative space and self.

In a single, improvised take, Shiroishi recorded his third solo LP, I was too young to hear silence. The record plays like a stripped-down ode to its star instrument. Solo saxophone dazzles and cascades through tangible air, each note hugged and trailed by a lush, natural reverb. Each silence, of which there are many, feels deliberate, sustained, honored.

https://patrickshiroishi.bandcamp.com/album/i-was-too-young-to-hear-silence