Sontag Shogun - It Billows Up (2019)

Brooklyn-based experimental trio Sontag Shogun present their new multimedia project and third full length album ‘It Billows Up’ across a variety of limited edition physical formats starting May 17.

Whereas Sontag Shogun's critically acclaimed 2017 album 'Patterns for Resonant Space' was an experiment in reverse-engineering & overdubbing improvised compositions, 'It Billows Up' is a linear, continuous narrative featuring ambient meshes of layered field recordings, analog oscillators, foley, and improvised piano.

While Pitchfork declared that Sontag Shogun is "never the same twice, always evolving to reveal something new" the band sought to capture an accurate representation of their live set using the collaborative techniques and modular compositions they had developed while on tour in Europe, Japan, and North America in 2016 and 2017.

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 its own grainy mist of synesthesia.