Patrick Shiroishi: I was too young to hear silence Album Review

The album was recorded in one take with a saxophone, glockenspiel, two microphones, and portable recorder. As a document of a live performance, it combines the tension of an improv set with the petty thrill of trespassing. “stand still like a hummingbird” opens with several seconds of silence before short saxophone blasts reveal the garage’s cavernous resonance. Running water, perhaps from a custodian or shopkeeper washing up late at night, can be heard in the background. As Shiroishi’s improv progresses, he develops a language of piercingly high notes, fluttering runs, and breathy puffs of air, all of which cascade through the concrete passages of the garage and return slightly delayed and diminished.

The centerpiece of I was too young to hear silence, the seven-minute “tule lake blues,” is a memorial for his grandparents that transitions from soulful melodies into keening metallic screeches, as if Shiroishi is finally voicing his grandmother’s wordless despair at the mention of the eponymous camp. Two songs after that cathartic moment, some of his loveliest playing appears on on “is it possible to send promises backwards?,” a joyfully acrobatic display that seems to glory in movement itself. Finally, “if only heaven would give me another ten years” closes the album with celebratory lines that arc brightly through the air before resting again in the silence of the Los Angeles night.

Shiroishi’s productivity is due in part to his versatility. Through a multitude of guest appearances, he has found a space for his saxophone in the Armed’s muscular hardcore, Agriculture’s ecstatic black metal, and Quicksails’ fractured electronica, among scores of others. But I was too young to hear silence showcases Shiroishi’s music at its purest. The raw, impromptu output of a player uniquely attuned to his instrument and purpose, it amounts to an exorcism of the generational trauma that informed this searching night underground.