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"it’s a nesting egg of an album, seven songs concluding with the 30-minute improvisation that inspired the album. The majority of the album traverses jazzy climes, where Feist-era Canadian indie and Prince demos are part of the same ecosystem and love in all its forms is the life-giving sun" - THE FADER
Jonah Yano is always shifting the unstable ground his songs rest on, revising it, making it anew. Often his compositions are warm, soulful, and hazily impressionistic, but Yano prefers to resist easy genre categorization, flitting, instead, between jazz and folk traditions, R&B and hip-hop, rock and ambient and electronic. On portrait of a dog — the 2023 LP he made with frequent collaborators BADBADNOTGOOD, praised in Pitchfork for its “cryptic, diaristic intimacy” — the Japanese-Canadian musician weaved his lilting, wistful voice into a harvest-hued mosaic of heartbreak and family memory, for which he recorded hours of conversations and digitized thousands of old photographs to wrestle with his grandfather’s encroaching dementia. The album featured guest contributions from Slauson Malone and Sea Oleena, with string arrangements by Eliza Niemi, Leland Whitty, and Yano. On Jonah Yano & the Heavy Loop, his forthcoming record out Oct. 4, Yano has once again upended his musical direction, crafting an experimental, chimerical album with the live ensemble-turned-studio band (Christopher Edmonson, Benjamin Maclean, Leighton Harrell, Felix Fox-Pappas, and Raiden Louie) that he’s been painstakingly scouting for the last three years. Yano has conceived of this as a kind of double-record; the anchoring song, The Heavy Loop, is a 30-minute feat of improvisation that sees the band leaning into noise music and free sound, and constitutes the “raw materials” of the album’s freewheeling soundscapes. “Concentrate,” the lead single, smoulders over subdued keys, bright guitar arpeggios, jazzy drums, and clarinet work from Clairo, whom Yano and his band opened for during her 2022 EU/UK tour. “If souvenir is about what I feel, and portrait of a dog is about what I remember or want to remember, then this album is about what I think,” says Yano. “And maybe that’s the difference.”
Though he now resides in Montreal, Yano was born in Hiroshima in 1994, and emigrated to Vancouver when he was four. He grew up listening to blues guitar players and classic rock music, and after learning the piano under his grandmother’s tutelage as a child, picked up the guitar in a “School of Rock-esque” middle school program. He started recording demos on his cellphone in 2016, when he moved to Toronto and joined up with the city’s burgeoning underground music scene. Many of the people he met and jammed with there — Monsune, Jacques Greene, Joseph L’Étranger, BBNG — became his eventual collaborators, and taught him technical skills he would use to record his first real songs. His friendship with the Toronto-based experimental music duo MONEYPHONE culminated with a song they made together called “On Lock,” his first ever feature, and Yano released his first solo single later that year, “Rolex, the Ocean.” “It’s important for me to interface with what’s happening in whichever localized area I’m in,” says Yano. “I always want my music to reflect where I am as much as what I’m trying to say.”
In his room and the home studios of friends, he began working on a suite of songs that would form his début project, the breezy, six-track Nervous EP (2019), which blended jazz, hip-hop, and R&B influences with subtle electronica. It introduced Yano as a soulful, genre-agnostic talent with an ear for melody and intimate songwriting, and he followed it up later that year with a lush cover of The Majestics’ “Key to Love (Is Understanding),” which the original Memphis funk/soul band praised as “well done with [a] slight personal twist.” Yano’s well-reviewed début album, souvenir, expanded the panoramic sonic landscape of his first EP, seamlessly weaving together drum’n’bass, rock, ambient, soul, jazz, and more. His free association-based songwriting introduced many of the themes that would prove central to his work — memory, family histories, the nuances of interpersonal relationships, identity fractured by diaspora — and the record included a reworked version of a song called “shoes,” which Yano’s then-estranged father, Tatsuya Muraoka, had recorded 25 years before their reconciliation. In Japanese, Muraoka sang about a pair of shoes he bought for his child son, and Yano, now older, filled it in by questioning his father’s absence from his childhood due to his parents’ separation: a duet traversing oceans and decades. He released the album on Father’s Day in 2020.
Since then, Yano’s work has earned praise in major international music publications, including Billboard, The Fader, CLASH, Exclaim, Complex, and Pitchfork. He’s been featured on NTS Radio, CBC Music’s The Intro, NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday, and performed on COLORS twice. He was twice nominated for the SOCAN Songwriting Prize, and has garnered the attention of Gilles Peterson, Benji B, and the late Virgil Abloh. He’s played the Montreal International Jazz Festival, the EFG London Jazz Festival, and toured Japan for ten solo shows in 2023. In 2024, he released the little italy demos, a three-song tape he made with his neighbour in Montreal, Le Ren. His forthcoming record features contributions from Helena Deland, Ouri, and Clairo.
Montreal’s Jonah Yano recruits frequent collaborator Clairo for the final offering ahead of his forthcoming album out this Friday, with new single “Snowpath.” Having toured together and collaborated several times over the past few years, Jonah and Clairo embody the nature of their collaborative relationship on the song. The song details the warmth of time spent with friends, bringing listeners into the setting in which it was recorded - a snowed-in studio in rural Ontario with two sets of fresh footprints in the snow.
Jonah’s new album, Jonah Yano & The Heavy Loop, came together with intimate collaboration in mind, as a departure from his previous two albums - both of which were intimate portraits of his personal and family life. His third album, out on October 4, 2024, is one open to improvisation and melding the collective visions of each member of his band, which has been years in the making: Christopher Edmonson, Benjamin Maclean, Leighton Harrell, Felix Fox-Pappas and Raiden Louis. Jonah remains at the helm as the record’s conductor and central figure, but draws on the strengths and inspirations of each member of the band to craft an album that still dives into personal experience through its tender lyrics, but evolves musically as the band feeds off of one another in the fruitful exchange of ideas in the studio and lively bouts of improvisation.
Montreal artist and songwriter Jonah Yano shares a new single “Someone Asked Me How I’ve Been.” The latest offering from his forthcoming album Jonah Yano and The Heavy Loop, the new song takes the sonic framework of Jonah’s roaming, improvisational 30-minute track “The Heavy Loop” and distills it into a focused track that opens with Jonah’s guitar and widens its scope as more of the band joins in. At its core, the new song centers on the confusion of being two things at once – a reflection from the time Jonah spent touring in Japan for the first time, where he grappled with being a mixed Japanese person in Japan, as well as feeling lonely and aimless at a time when he imagined he’d be living a dream of sharing his music in the place he’s from.
“Someone Asked Me How I’ve Been” serves as a testament to the collaborative environment Jonah set out to create when making this album, one open to improvisation and melding the collective visions of each member in his live-ensemble-turned band: Christopher Edmonson, Benjamin Maclean, Leighton Harrell, Felix Fox-Pappas and Raiden Louis. Jonah remains at the helm as the record’s conductor and central figure, but draws on the strengths and inspirations of each member of the band to craft an album that evolves as the musicians involved work together to achieve a collective vision.
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"an architect of recollection" Exclaim!
"warm, wistful, and quaint all at once" HYPEBEAST
"'contemplative and comforting" NPR
"His voice lilts with every syllable, making the imagery feel crushing and poignant" Pitchfork
Montreal artist and songwriter Jonah Yano announces his new album Jonah Yano & The Heavy Loop due October 4th. Coinciding with the album news, he shares two new songs, the previously-unheard “Romance ESL,” as well as releasing his momentous album closer “The Heavy Loop." Both songs, and his new album as a whole, signal an experimental new chapter in Yano’s creative trajectory and his first time working hand-in-hand with his band, Christopher Edmonson, Benjamin Maclean, Leighton Harrell, Felix Fox-Pappas and Raiden Louie. Together, they’ve crafted a collaborative album with Jonah at the helm, that melds free sound, rock, R&B and jazz traditions into a panoramic view of the experience of making an album.
Yano is a soulful, genre-agnostic talent, always shifting the unstable ground his songs rest on, revising it, making it anew. Having emigrated to Vancouver from Hiroshima at the age of four, much of Yano’s approach to music is influenced by his own fractured identity as a member of the Japanese-Canadian diaspora, as well as his larger interest in memory, family histories, and the nuances of interpersonal relationships. The result is a soundtrack that defies easy genre categorization and captures the grey area in which we can find the most fruitful experiences life has to teach us while also highlighting Jonah’s expert musical compositional skills. Yano’s band – composed of Raiden Louie (Drums), Chris Edmondson (Saxophone, Clarinet, Synthesizer), Benja (Guitar), Leighton Harrell (Bass) and Felix Fox-Pappas (Piano, Rhodes) -- first came together to record his 2023 single "concentrate" with Clairo. Now, Yano sits front and center playing the role of conductor as he guides the gentle haze of his musical soundscape into a new ever-evolving world with a steady hand.
Jonah Yano has made songwriting contributions to fellow Canadians Charlotte Day Wilson’s Cyan Blue and Mustafa’s forthcoming album Dunya. In 2023, Jonah released his sophomore album portrait of a dog, co-produced alongside BADBADNOTGOOD and received critical acclaim from outlets like RANGE, Pitchfork, and Exclaim!. He was twice-nominated for the SOCAN Songwriting Prize, drawing the attention of Gilles Peterson, Benji B and the late Virgil Abloh. He’s played the Montreal International jazz Festival, the EFG London Jazz Festival and toured Japan for ten solo shows in 2023. Earlier this year, he released the little italy demos, a three-song collaborative tape with his neighbor in Montreal, Le Ren.
"warm, wistful, and quaint all at once" - HYPEBEAST
"softly lit tones with a jazz influence, his fuzzy, lo-fi sense of soul touches upon the intimate at every turn" - CLASH
“dreamy soul-tinged adult alternative songs" - ALLMUSIC
On the heels of an album with BADBADNOTGOOD and working with the likes of Clairo & Mustafa, Jonah Yano returns with another collaboration. This time with fellow Canadian and next door neighbor Le Ren. "Lauren and I met in summer of 2021 when I was first living in montreal. We were introduced over text by a mutual friend of ours. A few weeks after we first met we decided to get together and try working on music together - I had just finished recording Portrait of a Dog. The first day we wrote together it went so well that we got together again the next day, and the next, and the next. I think over 2 weeks we must've spent at least 10 days writing songs together and recording onto my 4 track and computer. We've been friends ever since and are now next door neighbours. We live in Little Italy (hence the EP name) and our apartments share the same wall. The 3 demos on this are definitely the best summary of what we wrote together. And actually even though we live so close to each other, we haven't really gotten back together to write much since. I think these demos are a window into the short and special moment when we were on exactly the same page and wanted to make the same thing."
Check out the 3 song EP titled the little italy demos at this link.