I Was Too Young to Hear Silence by Patrick Shiroishi

We spend a lot of time in fascinatingly strange acoustic spaces without thinking much about what we’re observing. For instance, the parking garage that I Was Too Young to Hear Silence by Patrick Shiroishi was recorded in injects the album with gallons of reverb, giving Shiroshi’s saxophone the power to shapeshift and create a wide range of bizarre sounds. More importantly, however, Shiroishi allows ample space for us to sit in this garage with him in silent pauses, hearing the sound slowly dispel across the concrete as the player gradually takes another breath. The album’s title calls back to Shiroishi’s youth as a saxophone player who frantically expanded to fill any space he was given, throwing around the kind of constant arpeggiated lines that we get a taste of at the end of this record. However, Shiroishi’s more recent work puts more stock in silence as a constructive element, giving us a chance to experience his space and his process with him. Once we hear something like this, we can’t ignore the interplay between sound and silence in these curious spaces we inhabit.