Jonah Yano & The Heavy Loop

by Jonah Yano

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New Music Jason This album is my Feature Pick for September 28 - October 4, 2024, on my New Music page:

newmusicjason.wordpress.com/2024/10/04/the-new-music-im-listening-to-ceremoniously-this-week-september-28-october-4-2024/ Favorite track: The Heavy Loop.

Aila Phenomenal from front to back. Every single member of the band displays incredible musicianship across the project, especially on the final improvised track "The Heavy Loop". I'm especially a fan of Felix's solo segment around the 11 minute mark. Thank you so much for this beautiful project, Jonah. Favorite track: No Petty Magic (feat. Helena Deland & Ouri).

Elijah Valdez Following up Jonah Yano's fantastic 'portrait of a dog' wasn't going to be an easy feat, but god did he pull it off well. Jonah, Chris, Raiden, Benja, Felix, and Leighton, thank you for The Heavy Loop.

And God Bless Clairo fr.
Favorite track: The Language of Coincidence.

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1.	Devotion 02:52	lyrics	buy track
What else is there to do? I already love you Seems like we’re just staring at the seams Of what we’re bound by Or what we’re bound to No dominion to name Leaning towards the earth with my face From staring at the sun can’t see your face It’s funny what the light can replace or erase or replace And I know that sound I know that tune I don’t know how else I could have convinced you Devotion It never has an arc It’s the continuous spark Devotion The meticulous part Of my particular heart It’s what our words reveal The very real actual world The one I sleep beside you on It’s what our words conceal The very real actual fear Of knowing we’re dependent on The ceremony of thought It’s a little bit fraught As soon as I start to pick it apart I feel a little odd for thinking too hard I know that you are You said “it’s all that you are” Devotion It never has an arc It’s the continuous spark Devotion The meticulous part Of my particular heart
2.	Concentrate 04:41	lyrics	buy track
I need you Just to concentrate Are you coming over? I’m starting to smoulder like watercolour paint I need you Allow me to demonstrate And you Smile like a tyrant I take it on the chin It’s the modern way I’m noticing a silence Let’s stick to trying Making a display An example too Is an example rude? You tell me Between the two of us The things that ruin us Are what makes me think I need you Just to concentrate Are you coming over I’m starting to smoulder like water colour paint And I need you Allow me to demonstrate It’s four in the morning You’re in my apartment And you’re kissing my face I need you I need you I need you Just to concentrate And I need you I need you I need you Light light Travel Light When you’re on your way Real light if you make it out here
3.	No Petty Magic (feat. Helena Deland & Ouri) 03:43	lyrics	buy track
No petty magic Everything real Speed of the planet Time it conceals Forward, over, on Dizzy, dizzy, off Slowly, slow we Walk each other home Slow through the night Long starless night Carefully magic and Can you still feel The shape of my hand in your hand And the spell Forward, over, on Dizzy, dizzy, off Slowly, slow we Walk each other home I look back a puzzle The years in a knot I look back at rubble Sifting through it all Sifting, looking through it all
4.	Romance ESL 03:16	lyrics	buy track
Somewhere out there you’re the one for me I’m barely here This is romance In a second language There’s no chance I’m getting tongue tied tonight It’s just handfuls and handfuls Of intimation Let’s never leave the neighbourhood the neighbourhood! No one’s here Is anybody there No one’s here I’m looking for my lover No one’s here Is anybody there No one’s here I’m looking for my lover Somewhere did you hear me settle I’m comparing two heavy metals Like a pin drop with no sound It barely rattles Scared what you might lead me to lead me to No one’s here Is anybody there No one’s here I’m looking for my lover No one’s here Is anybody there No one’s here I’m looking for my lover This is romance in a second language
5.	Snowpath (feat. Clairo) 02:13	lyrics	buy track
It's just interest after all The kind that's barbed and already inside And here we are side by side Arm in arm tangled in my life 'til we're braided like a rope And in my car it's a 20 minute drive So here's my hat and a clementine That's what you mean to me Well I get sicker with your heart in mind And the moon gets dimmer and the room gets bright If there's no rhythm to an unstoked fire When my eyes meet the window will the world be wide? It's just interest after all The kind of moment when you know someone From very far Listen to the steps anticipate the move they make Down the hall to the stairs Into my room Poems with fruit for me and for you Well I get sicker with your heart in mind And the moon gets dimmer and the room gets bright If there's no rhythm to an unstoked fire When my eyes meet the window will the world be wide?
6.	The Language of Coincidence 03:29	lyrics	buy track
I’m watching how I speak I don’t want them noticing me I’m from the outside I don’t want them to see my disguise When the metro car fills up with eyes Luckily I breathe Between the words I speak Long live the lie That the spoken word casts us A permanent light If it won’t sell me out I’ll say whatever I want If it won’t sell me out I’ll say If it won’t sell me out I’ll say whatever I want I’ll go on and on ‘til I can understand what I want What a sweet relief You invited me to stare down a drink And close both our eyes Now picture what I’m saying There’s a world in your eyes I’m not sure what I’m saying Am I pronouncing it right? Coincidences speak If you listen close and ask what they mean Long live my lie That my spoken word casts me A permanent light If it won’t sell me out I’ll say whatever I want If it won’t sell me out I’ll say If it won’t sell me out I’ll say whatever I want I’ll go on and on ‘til I can understand what I want
7.	Someone Asked Me How I've Been 04:10	lyrics	buy track
Someone asked me how I’ve been What’s the worst I could say It’s true it’s true That I’m not happy where I’ve been But what’s worse is it could’ve been you Why don’t we start with context I didn’t know what I was waiting for Absence or presence what are neighbours for A home can be hard to keep Please give me understanding If I make it back to Setagaya City Cause I need to find that joy I have know That’s just the way it goes Someone asked me how I’ve been What’s the worst I could say It’s true well it’s true That I’m not happy where I’ve been But what’s worse is it could’ve been you Now I’m holding both my passports Can someone tell me what my name is for At the very least tell me what this shame is for This peace can be hard to keep Why don’t I understand it Is this the moment that my face is for I’m finally finding the fence I’m on This view must be hard to beat Someone asked me how I’ve been What’s the worst I could say It’s true well it’s true That I’m not happy where I’ve been But what’s worse is it could’ve been you Is that the way it goes?
8.	The Heavy Loop 30:23	lyrics	buy track
I’d just like to thank you all for being here Is lightning in a bottle what we’re seeing here Like an apparition that only appears On the one condition that it won’t be feared Now we’re just too devoted to the absolute We’re absolutely stuck inside the heavy loop The heavy loop is stretching arms above our heads To intertwine our fingers so they make amends The lesson here the lesson is That wanting different things Is the beginning of indifferences

about

Jonah Yano is an artist’s artist. A producer and songwriter who has collaborated on projects by peers like Fousheé, Mustafa and Charlotte Day Wilson, he’s also co-written alongside Helena Deland, Ouri, Clairo and Monsune on his own releases. Yano is 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. On portrait of a dog — the 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 grandfather’s encroaching dementia. The album featured guest contributions from Slauson Malone and Sea Oleena, with string arrangements by Eliza Niemi, Leland Whitty, and Yano. On Jonah Yano & the Heavy Loop, his forthcoming record out Oct. 4, Yano has 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 he’s been painstakingly scouting for the last three years. Yano has 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 album’s freewheeling soundscapes. “Concentrate,” the lead single, smoulders over subdued keys, bright guitar arpeggios, jazzy drums, and clarinet work from Clairo, whom Yano and his band opened for during her 2022 EU/UK tour. “If souvenir is about what I feel, and portrait of a dog is about what I remember or want to remember, then this album is about what I think,” says Yano. “And maybe that’s the difference.”

Though he now resides in Montreal, Yano was 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 grandmother’s 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 city’s burgeoning underground music scene. Many of the people he met and jammed with there — Monsune, Jacques Greene, Joseph L’Étranger, 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, and Yano released his first solo single later that year, “Rolex, the Ocean.” “It’s important for me to interface with what’s happening in whichever localized area I’m in,” says Yano. “I always want my music to reflect where I am as much as what I’m trying to say.”

In his room and the home studios of friends, he began working on a suite of songs that would form his début project, the breezy, six-track Nervous EP (2019), which blended jazz, hip-hop, and R&B influences with subtle electronica. It introduced Yano as 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.” Yano’s well-reviewed début album, souvenir, expanded the panoramic sonic landscape of his first EP, seamlessly weaving together drum’n’bass, 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,” which Yano’s 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, and Yano, now older, filled it in by questioning his father’s absence from his childhood due to his parents’ separation: a duet traversing oceans and decades. He released the album on Father’s Day in 2020.

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

credits

released October 4, 2024

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about

Jonah Yano Toronto, Ontario

shows

Nov 13

Capital Ballroom

Victoria, BC
Nov 14

Fortune Sound Club

Vancouver, BC
Nov 16

Commonwealth Bar

Calgary, AB
Nov 17

The Starlite Room - Temple

Edmonton, AB
Nov 19

Sidestage

Winnipeg, MB
Dec 3

Club SAW

Ottawa, ON
Dec 4

La Sala Rossa

Montreal, QC
Dec 6

The Garrison

Toronto, ON

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