Project TENORI by Shoko Igarashi

Touch, light, sound: the sensation of these three senses flowed like an electric shock the first moment this instrument was picked up by saxophonist, composer and electronic producer Shoko Igarashi.
Three senses sublimated into art by a single electronic device : the Yamaha Tenori-on.
Pieces composed by layers and repeated sequences intricately, and sometimes simply channeled through the musician.
A single note becomes one song just as many small fish can gather to become one big fish: simple but complex. Sequences which gradually morph into new realities.

About Shoko :
Shoko Igarashi was born in 1991 in Yamagata Prefecture, Tsuruoka city, Japan. An accomplished tenor saxophonist, she is also a versatile flautist and plays alto and soprano saxophone fluently. She has already made her mark as both an arranger and a composer. Shoko grew up surrounded by dreamlike landscapes of abundant nature in the snowy countryside of Tsuruoka, a mysterious and surreal region renowned for producing the best quality rice in Japan, where she says, “the water and the air feel the purest," and where mountains and shrines overflow with ancient mysticism.

After beginning her musical career in Tokyo, she attended the Berklee College of Music in Boston, where she graduated with a bachelor’s degree of music. She then relocated to Brooklyn, New York where she began regularly performing live alongside innumerable talented jazz musicians. In 2018, she moved to Brussels, Belgium.

Since 2018, Shoko has written and compiled a series of well-crafted, colourful electronic songs curating diverse influences such as Sly & the Family Stone, Earth Wind & Fire, Japanese City-Pop, '70s jazz fusion, and the anime film music that she grew up learning to play. Her nimble and seamless assembly of these very different elements into her unique sound is astonishingly natural. Her first official solo Album “SIMPLE SENTENCES” is released by Tigersushi Records on 20th MAY 2022. Buy records HERE.

Her album received many great album reviews from numerous platforms such as Pitchfork, Les Inrocks, and more.

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Album review from Toshio Iwai (developer of Tenori-on)

TENORI-ON is an electronic musical instrument that I developed with Yamaha over a period of about seven years, and since its release in 2007, it has been used by Bjork, Cornelius, Yoko Ono, Atom Heart, Little Boots, etc. used it and it became a hot topic. However, 16 years after its release,
TENORI-ON has already been discontinued and disappeared from the market. But then... Suddenly, I received a message on my Instagram from a musician named Shoko Igarashi, who lives in Brussels, saying that she was releasing an album from Faneca record that fully utilise TENORI-ON, and she wanted me to listen to it. “Why TENORI-ON now?” I wondered, and accessed the URL that she gave me on the
message. “Is this TENORI-ON?, it certainly sounded familiar…”. But before I could pay attention to such things, I felt my consciousness quickly melting into the sound - this was amazing! A sensation of drifting between consciousness and unconsciousness. The pleasure of concentration and release repeated one after the other. I heard that Shoko spent a lot of time with TENORI-ON during the COVID
lockdown, weaving these songs together. I wonder how much time she spent on.
She must have repeated the journey to her unconsciousness many times, probably combined with the strangeness of lockdown. The density of the sound of tracks make me imagine that. TENORI-ON has already disappeared from the market, but Shoko found new possibilities and showed them on this album. I’m just happy.

Toshio Iwai

Shoko Igarashi was born in Yamagata Prefecture, Japan.

An accomplished saxophonist, producer, and electro musician. She has already made her mark as both an arranger and a composer.

Her first Electro pop album "Simple Sentences" was released by Tigersushi records on May 2022.

shokoigarashi.com