Kimyō

Bon Odori is the meeting point of Patrick Shiroishi's raw alto sax physicality and Randall Taylor's deeply intense ambient textures. Their debut album, Kimyō, was built at a distance, trading sounds and half-formed ideas over a few weeks. The music breathes unevenly—heavy chord changes, irregular rhythms, distorted guitar—collapsing finally into one dense, imploding mass. Brief, collective and quietly overwhelming.

Across the album, Bon Odori moves with a constant sense of physical unease and restraint, music that seems to breathe unevenly rather than settle into comfort. “As I Imagine Them” harnesses heavy chord changes and a muffled beat to explore darkness, which is fueled by a typically menacing Shiroishi alto solo. “Creatures of Habit” is driven by an irregular heartbeat rhythm and drifting layers of grit, a pulse that holds steady just long enough to feel familiar before rupturing halfway through in noise, hardcore drums and aggression.

Elsewhere, near-still washes of noise open into wide waves of distorted guitar, so saturated they begin to feel fuzzy soft, while a voice slips in quietly, drifting between baritone and falsetto like a system testing its limits. By the time the final track, “The Weight We Carry,” arrives, everything collapses inward, as if the first seven tracks were a prelude—rhythm, noise, breath, memory and the wailing yowl of guest vocalist otay:onii.

From the outset, Bon Odori was shaped as an Asian-focused collaboration, not as a theme or a statement grafted on afterward, but as a working framework. “For me, especially the name that I pitched to Patrick, is a celebration of our heritage, culture, of music, of collaboration,” Taylor said. Shiroishi was even more direct. “Purposefully, all the guests are of Asian descent. The person who mixed it is of Asian descent. Even the label.” The name itself, borrowed from a Japanese communinal dance honoring ancestors, points toward a sense of shared movement rather than individual spotlight.