MERCHANDISE

Jonah Yano is an artist’s artist. A producer and songwriter who has collaborated on projects by peers like Fousheé, Mustafa and Charlotte Day Wilson, he’s also co-written alongside Helena Deland, Ouri, Clairo and Monsune on his own releases. 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 he 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 album 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.

*** releases October 4, 2024 ***

Reissue of "Time's All Gone" Vinyl in Burgundy; Limited to 500 Copies

About "Time's All Gone" - - >

Nick Waterhouse is the New Breed - a 25 year old R&B fanatic who combines an uncanny old-school sensibility with a charged, contemporary style. He joins the ranks of similar acts and producers of recent times - Mark Ronson, Amy Winehouse, Sharon Jones, Mayer Hawthorne, Aloe Blacc et al – that are all moving forward into the past, yet all quite different. For Waterhouse, his muse is the over-modulated sound of vintage ‘50s R&B. His take on such a time-honored tradition evokes the back-alley thrill of New Orleans, Detroit and Memphis in their heyday and has resonated with fans the world over (his debut 45 sells for upwards of $300 dollars). Waterhouse combines an astute attention to detail with an honest desire to match.  

“This music is more for the creatures than for the humans” - Songwriter, producer, and multi-instrumentalist Sam Blasucci.

Having spent the last 10 years tinkering with his songwriting through his extensive catalog with folk/rock group Mapache, as well as his debut solo album ‘Off My Stars’, Sam works alongside co-producer Johnny Payne for his follow up sophomore solo album ‘Real Life Thing’ via Calico Discos. Sam & Johnny take a leap from everything they have done in the past into brand new territory for this collection of songs. Sam connects new dots and bends genres with unheard style and instrumentation on songs like ‘Death’, with words adding to the conversation of gender and sexuality. The occult-dancer lead single ‘Witching Hour’ pulses with feeling through a high energy chorus built around a beautiful and bold middle section of just percussion and vocals. In addition to new pathways, homage is also paid to Sam’s first loves of music through the notable Motown feel of the existential soul tune ‘Flower’, as well as the vintage pop gleam of ‘No Magic’. These songs are two examples of the recurring lyrical themes of life and death on this record. “Something clicked before I wrote these songs that put me in a place of wonder and confusion and bliss that I had never experienced before.” Some of the lyrics found on this record have been previously released in Sam’s debut book of poetry ‘Guidelines For Dying’, which quickly sold out of its first print.

While remaining quite elusive to genre or category, a few of Blasucci’s deepest influences can still be spotted throughout the musical and lyrical shape of his new album. New literary and musical discoveries seem to be constant for Sam, but shades of Leonard Cohen, Prince, and Bjork peak out behind this batch of songs as well as the writings of Ariana Reines, John O’Donohue, and Edgar Allen Poe. Sam notes that the many influences around him became heavier and more vibrant after falling extremely ill for two years between 2020 and 2022. “Gaining back my ability to be active, to travel, to live - it was all very much a rebirth in so many ways. Things emerged sharper and clearer from that period of my life”. Sam is healthy and moving forward at a seemingly fast pace with this new album and the accompanying conceptual concert film of the same name.

The film - directed by Sam and produced/shot by Bryce Makela - brings these influences and songs into a literal Real Life Thing through their collaborative visions and physical representations of the album. Filmed at the same studio where the album was recorded - Carbonite Sound in Ojai, CA - the film runs like a type of musical play. The album is performed live with stage hands and different set changes to accentuate each mood throughout the record - certainly Sam’s most ambitious project to date.

Sam was born in Los Angeles in November 1994 and currently lives in Ojai, CA. Having had residence in Los Angeles, CA / Coahuila, MX / Orem, UT & New Orleans, LA - it’s safe to assume Sam will be on the move again soon and with more fresh energy to give of himself through his art. Determined to live by creation, Sam is the type of artist that is always creating something, maintaining a sort of inexhaustible hunger to make his music. Expressing himself through sound has now gone beyond joy and into being second nature and Sam’s real first language.