Jonah Yano & The Heavy Loop

Description

JonahYanois an artists artist. A producer and songwriter who has collaborated on projects by peers like Foushe, Mustafa and Charlotte Day Wilson, hes also co-written alongside Helena Deland, Ouri, Clairo and Monsune on his own releases.Yanois 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. Onportrait of a dogthe 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 grandfathers encroaching dementia. The album featured guest contributions from Slauson Malone and Sea Oleena, with string arrangements by Eliza Niemi, Leland Whitty, andYano. OnJonahYano& the Heavy Loop, his forthcoming record out Oct. 4,Yanohas 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 hes been painstakingly scouting for the last three years.Yanohas 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 albums freewheeling soundscapes. Concentrate, the lead single, smoulders over subdued keys, bright guitar arpeggios, jazzy drums, and clarinet work from Clairo, whomYanoand his band opened for during her 2022 EU/UK tour. Ifsouveniris about what I feel, andportrait of a dogis about what I remember or want to remember, then this album is about what I think, saysYano. And maybe thats the difference.

Though he now resides in Montreal,Yanowas 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 grandmothers 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 citys burgeoning underground music scene. Many of the people he met and jammed with there Monsune, Jacques Greene, Joseph Ltranger, 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, andYanoreleased his first solo single later that year, Rolex, the Ocean. Its important for me to interface with whats happening in whichever localized area Im in, saysYano. I always want my music to reflect where I am as much as what Im trying to say.

In his room and the home studios of friends, he began working on a suite of songs that would form his dbut project, the breezy, six-track Nervous EP(2019), which blended jazz, hip-hop, and R&B influences with subtle electronica. It introducedYanoas 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.Yanos well-reviewed dbut album,souvenir, expanded the panoramic sonic landscape of his first EP, seamlessly weaving together drumnbass, 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, whichYanos 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, andYano, now older, filled it in by questioning his fathers absence from his childhood due to his parents separation: a duet traversing oceans and decades. He released the album on Fathers Day in 2020.

Since then, Yanos work has earned praise in major international music publications, including Billboard, The Fader, CLASH, Exclaim, Complex, and Pitchfork. Hes been featured on NTS Radio, CBC Musics The Intro, NPRs 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. Hes played the Montreal International Jazz Festival, the EFG London Jazz Festival, and toured Japan for ten solo shows in 2023. In 2024, he releasedthe little italy demos, a three-song tape he made with his neighbour in Montreal, Le Ren.

*** releases October 4, 2024 ***