Columbia Deluxe by Fuubutsushi (live)

Columbia Deluxe imbues Fuubutsushi’s music with the electricity of playing for a crowd. Borne of the lockdown of the COVID-19 pandemic, the group prepared countless releases remotely from around the country. Columbia Deluxe expands compositions collected from across the band’s body of work, from their earliest releases to their 2024 LP Meridians, translating their careful arrangements into live performance. All four time zones of the continental US are represented in the group's membership: Patrick Shiroishi (Los Angeles), Chris Jusell (Raleigh), Matthew Sage (Colorado Front Range), and Chaz Prymek (Salt Lake City). It’s fitting given the musical landscapes that it surveys, which are dynamic, warm, and both energetic and rewarding of patience. The band has heightened these qualities on Columbia Deluxe.

“The music of Fuubutsushi,” Prymek says, “started as a recording project that turned into deep friendships.” After composing music remotely for their acclaimed cycle of four albums for each of the four seasons, the quartet transformed the music in concert at the Columbia Experimental Music Festival (to this day Fuubutsushi’s only live appearance): Shiroishi on saxophones and field recordings, Jusell on violin, Sage on piano and synthesizer, and Prymek on guitar and bass, sharing bells, voice and electronics as a group. “I think we were all pretty nervous about it,” says Shiroishi, “but the audience was with us the entire time and really gave us an incredible amount of energy.” “Part of the thrill,” says Sage, “was that we knew the songs separately, kind of on our own terms. And how it felt to finally turn this music, which we made in such a physically isolated way, to finally come into being in person, for a really receptive audience in a really beautiful room.”

There’s a punk ethos at the music’s heart that refracts the group’s stylistic diversity. Jusell has a foundation in classical music, chamber music and pop. As a solo artist and member of The Armed, Shiroishi is rooted in jazz, heavy music, and the places where they intersect. Prymek’s chordal fingerstyle guitar vocabulary, and Sage’s openness to experimentation in music and intermedia art, ground the compositions while giving them room for the band to lift off. As Prymek says, “we’re influenced by everything, but especially by each other.”

“Now,” says Prymek, “what you hear out of us is that energy spilling back into our music.” It flows seamlessly from one song to the next, giving the band room to range while maintaining structure. “Bolted Orange” runs just over three minutes on the band’s self-titled debut album: here the band expands it to ten, blossoming, like the first half of the album, around Prymek’s winding, circular guitar lines. Guitar introduces that song and “Shepherd’s Stroll,” followed by declarative piano from Sage. Saxophone and violin either outline the chordal instruments’ color or push them in new directions. In keeping with past releases, the band incorporates field recordings of Japanese Americans talking about their experience in American internment camps during WWII into the music, inviting listeners to confront the past, present and future.

Columbia Deluxe is intimate on the surface, and shot through with the thrill of creative risk-taking. Midway through “Shepherd’s Stroll,” with no warning, after developing the composition with dusky, spacious fingerstyle guitar, Prymek moves to bass guitar, pulling out a lumberjack riff. In response, Jusell’s violin soars, repeating a striking, elliptical double-stopped melody. The music swells even more with Shiroishi’s saxophone, as if time-traveling from Western soundtracks to impressions of French court music to—on “Mistral”—gospel time-stretched and zoomed-in. Sage oscillates the song between gigantic chords and rubato arpeggios, during which the song’s structure threatens to give way. Through barely perceptible differences in pitch and tonality, Shiroishi and Jusell keep it together by controlling the chaos.

The energy Prymek describes is nearly palpable here, and the music transformed: a “pure manifestation” (Jusell) of unfolding “joy, stumbles, getting up and pushing forward together” (Shiroishi). As Prymek says, “we are making something forever blooming anew,” and it continues to bloom.

Live recordings from Fuubutsushi, a quartet featuring Patrick Shiroishi, Chris Jusell, Chaz Prymek, and Matthew Sage.

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