Experience the legendary midnight movie sensation that firmly embedded samurai mythology within American pop culture consciousness. A giddily entertaining, hallucinatory classic of grindhouse mayhem with an immersive live soundtrack by SONTAG SHOGUN on piano, organ and analog electronics.
Shogun Assassin (Dir. Kenji Misumi and Robert Houston, 1980, 85 mins). The legendary midnight movie sensation that firmly embedded samurai mythology within American pop culture consciousness, a giddily entertaining, mesmerizingly gory classic of East-meets-West grindhouse mayhem. Following the murder of his wife at the hands of an evil shogun, an avenging ronin (Tomisaburo Wakayama) roams the countryside with his young son—and the boy’s sword-shooting baby carriage—in tow, dispatching ninja assassins with steely resolve in operatically stylized flurries of hallucinatory violence-- Shogun Assassin proved an instant cult favorite that has bubbled its way up from the underground to the mainstream thanks to its influence on artists ranging from the Wu-Tang Clan to Quentin Tarantino.
Sontag Shogun is a collaborative trio that makes use of analog sound treatments and nostalgic solo piano compositions in harmony to depict abstract places in our memory. Textures built from organic materials such as sand, slate, boiling water, brush and dried leaves, both produced live in performance and recorded to weathered ¼" tape warm up the space between lush piano themes. All of which is abstracted coolly in the reflective digital space of treated vocals and a live-processed feed from the piano. Bringing us back, like a faded passing scent or any natural emotive trigger, but to where? The wordless journey there will inevitably be more revealing than the destination itself. Sontag Shogun recently released Päiväkahvit in collaboration with Lau Nau on Portland's renowned Beacon Sound label.
Ian Temple: piano, organ
Jeremy Young: magnetic tape loops, oscillators, amplified objects & surfaces
Jesse Perlstein: treated vocals, field recordings, and electronics
The band has improvised alongside artists as diverse as Matana Roberts, Julia Kent, Oren Ambarchi, Greg Fox, Shinya Sugimoto, Tom Carter, Diana Combo, and Aki Onda as well as poets, choreographers, butoh dancers, filmmakers, an improvised fashion designer, a collective of Japanese contemporary video artists, slide projectionists, and scentscape installation artists. They’ve been Hans Appelqvist’s backing band, they’ve done weddings, they’ve performed with a string quartet at MoMA, they’ve performed in 40 speaker channels, they’ve scored short films and curated live film scoring evenings, they’ve recorded sections of Meriwether Lewis’ 1804 journal, they’ve played during a performance installation of a giant 18-foot living flower sculpture, they’ve scored an old-timey baseball game in Brooklyn, opened (somehow) for legendary post-punks The Primitive Calculators and This Is Not This Heat on separate occasions. And they have shared the stage with other notable artists including Hauschka, Maggi Payne, David Grubbs, Ben Vida, Fly Pan Am, minamo, Christopher Bissonnette, Nicola Ratti, Hans Appelqvist, Chris Forsyth, Mountains, Sam Shalabi, Noveller, Helena Espvall, Jerusalem in my Heart, Sculptress of Sound, Earthen Sea, Johannes Bergmark, Moskitoo, Ultraam, Machinefabriek, F.S. Blumm, Blevin Blectum, Asuna, Marcus Fischer, Hiro Kone, Andrew Bernstein, Bromp Treb, The Dead Rat Orchestra, as well as many, many others.
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