Forgetting is Violent, Patrick Shiroishi’s latest solo LP, is his most immediate release yet, expanding the scope not just of his music but of his extramusical considerations. Where his past releases on American Dreams reckoned with racism against Japanese Americans or presented Shiroishi’s saxophone as heard in a parking garage, Forgetting is Violent considers racism as a whole, historical and ongoing, with the urgency it deserves. Here, for the first time, we hear Shiroishi joined by a supporting cast that reads like a who’s-who of heavy music: Aaron Turner (SUMAC, ISIS), Gemma Thompson (Savages), Faith Coloccia (Mamiffer), otay::onii (Elizabeth Colour Wheel), and Mat Ball (BIG|BRAVE). The constant, as ever, is Shiroishi's patient, probing musicality, marrying heaviness and lightness, acceptance and defiance, both packing a punch and welcoming new listeners into the fold. 

“I’m always interested in pushing the horn,” Shiroishi says. “You’re not gonna sound sweeter than Paul Desmond. You’re not gonna write crazier melodies and harmonies than Ornette. So I'm trying to figure out: what can I do different, while being me, and expressing what I’ve gone through?” Even though Shiroishi began writing the music on Forgetting is Violent years ago, while supporting Godspeed You! Black Emperor on tour, his honed craft is apparent on record. On his 2023 tour supporting Emma Ruth Rundle, which brought his powerful live sets to a larger audience, he built on his signature sound, using effects pedals to loop, freeze and distort notes with his saxophone. Most of all, the music comes from his lived experience and the desire to reach others with it. The effects pedals, the field recordings, the arrangements—Shiroishi says, “they're all tools to convey a message.” 

It follows, then, that Forgetting is Violent is his first album to feature guests. “I think it stems from my love for collaboration,” he says. “I’ve been a part of a lot of ensembles, a lot of different free improvised stuff. And a lot of that playing is where I gain new insight into what I can develop further in my solo practice.” Between his work as a solo artist, work with The Armed, collaborative releases, and guest appearances, Shiroishi’s discography is as dizzying as it is diverse, including work with—among countless others—Chelsea Wolfe, Algiers, Xiu Xiu, Dirty Projectors, Che Chen and claire rousay. On Forgetting is Violent, we hear coruscating guitars, layered vocal harmonies and daubs of electronics along Shiroishi’s saxophone—even his voice. Turner wields a massive guitar on the album’s first three songs. Thompson joins on guitar on “Mountains that take wing,” and Coloccia’s electronics & voice undergird “…what does anyone want but to feel a little more free?”. Whether soft or raucous, spacious or dense, Shiroishi provides the fire, his collaborators the ice.

Shiroishi’s message on Forgetting is Violent comprises two suites. The first meditates on racism and colonialism from history to the present day. “Mountains that take wing” introduces the first theme of the album, a gentle repetition for saxophone anchored around middle C. While Thompson and Turner’s guitars approach but never quite reach consonance, Shiroishi adds more saxophone. The music spirals. Eventually one hears him, as if from a distance, singing slowly in Japanese. On “…what does anyone want but to feel a little more free?,” Shiroishi’s aunt, an antiracist advocate, speaks to her first experience of racism. The suite recalls the Japanese concept of gaman, or enduring the unendurable. Here, in music and words, are the tensions inherent to racism, part of living in a society that—whether through small gestures of disconnect, forced deportation or concentration camps—wants to make you extinct. “Stemming back to my ancestors, and the stolen land that we live on—there’s just so much of this racism that is so alive and well, and so apparent, and continues to be apparent in our country and around the world,” Shiroishi says. “Something that cannot be forgotten.”

Shiroishi wrote the second suite, which comprises side B, for a family member who died of an overdose. “It’s grappling with what I imagined he would have felt leaving this earth, leaving behind kids—and now being in the sky and watching over them.” These tracks mostly feature Shiroishi solo, singing a simple wordless melody over a soft synthetic drone. But on closing track “Trying to get to heaven before they close the door,” he harmonizes with himself, arranging the melody as if for a choir. Meanwhile, Ball's guitar exhumes great clouds of static, mixing with Shiroishi’s vocal harmonies and caterwauling saxophone. Here, in miniature, is the simultaneous potency of grief and its aftershocks, the sacred and profane.

“That act of sharing and bringing it up, even though it’s difficult,” Shiroishi says, “it makes us feel like we’re not alone. And I think that’s important, especially in a time where it’s just so fucking grim, that we can support each other and be together, that there is hope in the future….” As time passes and genocide looms, Shiroishi’s music—insistent, liquid, organic—is but one source of hope.

Featuring liner notes by Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Hua Hsu, Forgetting is Violent is released in companion with the third edition of Tangled: a publication collecting stories, poems and essays by Asian-American musicians, including Anne Ishii, Yuka Honda, Satomi Matsuzaki and Kazu Makino.