Based in New York City, Laraaji began playing music on the streets in the 1970s, improvising trance-inducing jams on a modified autoharp processed through various electronic eLects. Influential British musician and record producer Brian Eno saw him playing one night in Washington Square Park and invited him to record an album of ambient music at his studio.
Laraaji went on to release a prolific series of albums for a wide variety of labels, many of which he recorded himself at home and sold as cassettes during his street performances. In recent years his profile has enjoyed a renaissance via a series of new and reissued recordings on the All Saints label, as well as worldwide performances, laughter meditation workshops and deep listening sessions.
Laraaji has also collaborated with a new generation of underground musicians such as Sun Araw, their new LP Professional Sunflow (Superior Viaduct) being the fruit of the live shows they played together in 2014.
Patrick Shiroishi is a Japanese American multi-instrumentalist and composer based in Los Angeles who is perhaps best known for his extensive and incredibly intense work with the saxophone. Over the last decade he has established himself as one of the premier improvising musicians in Los Angeles, playing solo and in numerous collaborative projects. Shiroishi may well be considered a foundational player in the city’s vast musical expanse.
Shiroishi’s recent new album Glass House celebrated its release on September 20th. The recordings were made between November 2023 and February 2024 in the Orange Door studio in Los Angeles and are the score of a Volta Collective play of the same name directed by Mamie Green – an immersive performance deconstructing mythologies of home.
Shiroishi has presented work and performed at the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the International Museum of Surgical Sciences and has toured around the world in various solo and band configurations including The Armed, contemporary classical ensemble Wild Up and Upsilon Acrux.
