Pitchfork

34 Great Records You May Have Missed: Spring/Summer 2022

Japanese city pop was more than a decade old by 1991, when Shoko Igarashi was born, but the 31-year-old Berklee graduate’s music is so faithful to the recently revived genre that it’d be easy to mistake it for the real thing. Her solo debut, Simple Sentences, is a cheerful tour of vintage sounds that sparkle as if they just came out of shrink wrap: glassy FM synths, rubbery slap bass, cryogenic faux woodwinds. Dreamy downbeat jams like “Comfy Place” find a halfway spot between Flat Earth-era Thomas Dolby and Detroit techno, and while the album’s release on Tigersushi places it in dialogue with a broad swath of contemporary electronic dance music, her jazz training shines through in her dazzlingly unpredictable chord changes, which are less Berghain than Burt Bacharach. –Philip Sherburne

The 50 Best Album Covers of 2022

Our Culture

The compositions on Simple Sentences, the debut LP from Japanese musician Shoko Igarashi, are soothing, fluidly arranged, and playfully enchanting. Its diverse range of influences blend into each other seamlessly, balancing a sense of wistful naivete and dream logic. The beguiling cover image suggests a blurring of consciousness; photographer Victor Pattyn aimed for “a mix between aesthetic & feelings,” juxtaposing “the tenderness in her eyes” with the void the character dissolves into. Igarashi commented on the process: “The album cover was made out of experimentation around the idea to shoot through different glass objects so by placing pieces of glass in front of the camera lenses which created some cool natural distortion effects. No editing was needed because Victor Pattyn the photographer knew how to improvise with these elements and get the result that he imagined. I’m really pleased with the way it came out so spontaneously.” 

Les Inrock

10 pages de découvertes et coups de coeur (j’y parle, entre autres, du disque perdu de ce groupe perdu qu’est Moonlove, de la Japonaise @shokoigarashimusic ou encore de l’énigmatique Maria BC) -

Agnes b Radio

This is the debut solo album of prodigy Shoko Igarashi. She grew up in Japan, studied in the US, and now living in Brussels. Shining in its diversity, it carries elements from her rural Japan, from her love for anime songs, the rigorousness of her Boston Berklee jazz education (she's a saxophonist), European bleep techno & Warp, and even euro disco psych kitsch. Simple Sentences is like its title implies : straightforward in its brilliance and simplicity, yet carefully measured with a maturity that almost makes us wonder - how did Shoko manage to absorb all these influences and bring them together into a vibrant sound collage which ultimately is fresh and timeless.

Botanical Nights 2022

Highlights of the third week

Malgré le succès incontesté de Anna Meredith, que vous pouvez découvrir dans son NPR Music Tiny Desk, c’était bel et bien pour Shoko Igarashi que nos oreilles vibraient le 11 mai dernier au Grand Salon. Beaucoup de Belges étaient venu·es admirer la complexe élégance de la multi-instrumentiste. Même si l’artiste nous vient du Japon et des Etats-Unis, elle est un peu notre fierté de la scène alternative jazz bruxelloise. La saxophoniste nous avait déjà impressionné·es lors du Fifty Lab en novembre dernier, malgré le manque d’atmosphère dans on set dû à un trop peu de scénographie. De quoi placer notre excitation au plus haut pour l’arrivée de Shoko au Botanique, cette fois-ci entourée des jeux de lumières du Grand Salon. Point de saxo dans les rangs de ses instruments à vent, aujourd’hui, c’est flûte traversière, clarinette et clarinette électrique. Elle s’accompagne de Casimir Liberski (encore un virtuose), son fidèle comparse, au synthé analogique de l’espace.

Apparel Music Review

Shoko Igarashi Sentences (Tiger sushi records)

All in all a great work, archetypical of a conscious artists who perfectly knows how to follow her inner acoustic spirit guide. And shouts to Tigersushi for being in charge of the whole project but most importantly to the artist Shoko Igarashi and her Simple Sentences for proposing her truly personal > therefore honest > therefore authentic > therefore beautiful work and a must listen for me.