"Patrick Shiroishi's Descension is a beautifully elegiac and unflinchingly primal album. With richly layered solo saxophone, electronics, and voice, the album is a meditation on the legacy of a dark history and its echoing relevance in the present era. Descension is a spiritual journey that reveals Shiroishi's deeply reflective and unique musical vision. Over the past decade Shiroishi has established himself as one of the key artists in Los Angeles's free improvisation and avant-garde undergrounds. An incredibly inventive and versatile player, Shiroishi has collaborated with everyone from epic post-rock maximalists Godspeed You! Black Emperor to Radu Malfatti, the Austrian composer who pioneered the ultra-quiet reductionist school of improvisation. Shiroishi has also led or been at the center of innumerable ensembles which currently include Danketsu 10, Borasisi, Nakata, Kogarashi, Komeshi Trio. His previous groups include in the Womb, Oort Smog, oxox, Hoboglyphs, and Upsilon Acrux. On his debut album for Thin Wrist Recordings and his first solo vinyl release, Shiroishi makes a deep examination of his own ancestral history. "In the fall of 2016 I started researching heavily into the concentration camps of Japanese-American citizens during World War II," says Shiroishi. "My grandparents on my father's side met and married in the camps at Tule Lake, a place my grandmother never spoke about to me when she was alive. As I began to dive deeper, it naturally began to sink into my improvisations and work." In the context of events that were unfurling in real time, Shiroishi's work began to bridge the past with the present, using improvisation as the most immediate means of expression: "Everything on Descension was recorded in one take in the order that it appears," recalls Shiroishi. "I didn't prepare any melodies or form prior to the session; I anticipated playing layers and layers of noise. The record is a representation of how I had been processing the horrors of the present -- the sadness of the loss of life not only in the states but through the genocides in Sudan, Myanmar, Iraq and Syria, anger that migrant children are being separated from their parents and being held in concentration camps again, the frustration that times really are frighteningly similar to when my grandparents were growing up." Rather than create any sort of literal or agitprop statement, Shiroishi's work tapped into a timeless spiritual tradition of music -- closer to those of artistic heroes such as Coltrane or Ayler." - Thin Wrist.
After nearly a decade of false starts, multiple game plans veering off the rails, and a handful of shattered hopes and/or dreams, the odyssey is finally complete—the new Fusetron site is here.
This is the first phase of a multipart rollout that will span the next few months: the currently browsable stock includes miscellaneous new releases from the past 8+ months (we have a lot of catching up to do), plus approximately a third of our backstock. Note that we’ve reduced/slashed prices on many titles and will continue to do so in order to make room for new stock. We’ll also be expanding / tweaking / improving / debugging the site itself (for example, we still have work to do on the automated international postage system, not to mention the inevitable inventory discrepancies that come with transferring an ancient and massive database to a new system).
Over the next few months, as we take inventory, clean house, and delve into our storage, we will be uploading thousands of additional items, gradually, on a near-daily basis. This will include the majority of the LPs, as well as many titles, in all formats, once thought long-gone. Many currently “sold out” items are likely to resurface.
Finally, once our general backstock is up (probably in the next two or three months) we’ll begin making our extensive stockpile of rarities available online for the first time: tons of random out-of-print titles, "deadstock," warehouse finds, secondhand collectibles, etc., accumulated over the past few decades.
Frequent/returning customers will be getting early access to these items. Details to follow on how this will work (a priority mailing list? a 'frequent flyer'-like program?), but it will not be based on dollars spent. We want to reward those who consistently support us, especially in the discogs marketplace era (to those who show up trying to poach five copies of a one-off rarity, and nothing else, ever… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ).
So—we suggest you take some time to dig through the site—even we’ve been surprised by what’s been turning up, and there’s much more to come.
