It’s a measure of how fully the Covid pandemic turned the world of music inside out that we journalists are still writing about it now. Its effect was twofold. There was a subtle shift in the kind of music being made (we began to notice a small but significant boom in spiritual jazz, ambient, new age, Japanese-inspired city pop and vaporwave). More noticeably, there was a change in the practical methods of the recording and production of music. Isolation seemed to make the will to collaborate stronger, even as the means of physical collaboration reduced almost to nothing. Artists came up with new and inspired ways to work together. Technology was put to great use. Musicians who once passed each other like ships in the night suddenly noticed each other’s signals blinking across the firmament of the internet. It was an unexpectedly fertile time.
And one of its most fertile projects was Fuubutsushi, an ambient jazz combo featuring Patrick Shiroishi (saxophones), Chris Jusell (violin), Chaz Prymek (guitar and bass) and Matthew Sage (percussion and keys). They released records at an admirably prolific clip in the wake of the pandemic: one for each of the four seasons in their first year together, plus a double LP, an EP and a handful of standalone pieces. What marks them out as different from many of their contemporaries – and as real products of lockdown – is the fact that they have recorded all of their music remotely, leaving little scope for traditional notions of practice and rehearsal. In fact, they have only performed together live on one single occasion.
Luckily for us, that performance at the Columbia Experimental Music Festival was recorded and has now been released as Columbia Deluxe. It contains a selection of the group’s material from those earlier albums, but often the versions here are vastly different from their originals. The opening track “Bolted Orange” is a case in point. The recording on their 2020 debut is three minutes long, a clipped and condensed piece with an almost haiku-like brevity. Here, they extend it to ten minutes. Prymek’s fingerpicked guitar lays the hypnotic groundwork, somewhere between American primitivism and Reichian minimalism. There are shades of devotional music with the wordless hums and chants that fill the background, and when the piano and sax come in it feels like a plant blooming for the first time, revealing unexpected colours.
Though the mood across the recording is still reflective, there is a new-found wildness in the music, a willingness to experiment on the fly. Shiroishi’s sax in the opening seconds of “I Hold Dearly (for Miles)”seems uncanny, almost Lynchian, before Sage’s keys arrive to tether it to more familiar jazz ground. But then Jusell slips in almost unnoticed, and before long the track has moved off in another direction: twinkling neoclassical chamber pop with hints of a post-rock structure. “Light in the Annex” advances on a piano melody which is stately without being sombre, makes use of some emotionally charged chord progressions and some powerful sax, melts into a swoon of violin and concludes in a kind of extended exhalation, all four members’ instruments mingling together like breath on a cold day.
As is the case on their previous releases, the group uses a smattering of field recordings. The most notable of these are the testimonies of Japanese Americans talking about their time in American WWII prison camps. Such a recording runs through the majority of “Loop Trails”, and for a while, the music seems to become a vehicle for something more important: a lesson from history as much as a history lesson. “Mistral” has a much lighter, more flighty feel. The piano chords are celebratory, and the sax is sunny and laid back. Only the violin, pressing on regardless, hints at urgency, before all the instruments trip into a series of fluttering arpeggiated passages where the melody seems to fold in on itself for a few seconds at a time. “Shepherd’s Stroll” seems centred around Prymek’s almost folky guitar – a pastoral reverie the colour of a hay-rick – before he interrupts himself and switches to bass, and the piece acquires a new density and inevitability.
Fuubutsushi somehow manage to sound simultaneously like a bunch of musicians who have never met and a group who have been playing together for an eternity, and with today’s remote recording techniques, that apparent paradox can actually ring true. These tracks, in a live setting, have developed a life beyond the logistical constraints of their conception. Beautiful and increasingly complex, they have become a celebration of live performance and a reminder of how music can still play a vital role in human interaction.
Columbia Deluxe (July 11th, 2025) American Dreams.
Order: https://fuubutsushilive.bandcamp.com/album/columbia-deluxe