Category: Profiles

Cornell-hailing punk band Sonic Reducers tap into a vibrant and genuine art form in a DIY fashion.

The weather outside is far too warm for an autumn day. Sonic Reducers begin appearing on my screen, smiling. Everyone appears to be in the serene moods. It may be virtual and my glimpses of body language are terribly limited, but the aura radiating from Sonic Reducers casts a comfortable feeling into the air. Their music is punk yet not riotous; their sound sits in an eclipse of punk and indie fuzz rock. The chillness of Sonic Reducers is warm, welcoming, and the delegation of answering questions is natural. No one appears hindered by the influences of any great city. Floating in cyberspace now, we delve into the intricacies of the band. A mere year-and-a-half-old, Sonic Reducers have a full-length out, and it’s self-titled.

Ayta Mandzhieva, a junior architecture student and native Russian, began dreaming of forming a punk band after she had read Percy Jackson & the Lightning Thief in Russian. One of the main characters mentioned Green Day, she googled the moniker, and shortly thereafter began learning guitar. Somehow it was her first time telling this story as her bandmates replied in wonderment that they had never known the genesis of her musical passions. During the Cornell Orientation Week (the first week before school for freshmen to mingle and acclimate), Ayta met her future bandmate and drummer Jackson Rauch at a collegetown party. They dove into a conversation about music and agreed to play together, getting ideas flowing already. Since Orientation Week brims with activities, all four members found themselves at the same event.

Luke Slomba, the lead singer and guitarist, arrived a half-hour late to a half-hour long radio open house and serendipitously met Ayta and Sebastian at the Cornell radio station. The inevitable freshman mistakes and college radio encounters all follow in the jagged way that punk kids meet. Luke recognized Ayta as she was in the same architecture major, and introduced her to his roommate and future bassist of Sonic Reducers, Sebastian Fernandez.

Ayta casually mentioned to Luke that she was in a band to which Luke replied “That’s so cool! I could show up if  you have a practice or something!”

At the heart of punk is a keen messy candor. Add college students to the mix and you end up with frazzled and genuine art. They also carry a quirky performing history, with the guitar and bass player shotgunning La Croix seltzers throughout the intro of their song return to ithaca. The half-wild nature of Sonic Reducers manifested naturally, a bunch of passionate college students existing creatively together.

Their first practice occurred at Cornell’s program housing dorm called Just About Music, JAM for short. Afterwards, the unnamed quartet sat at a table in the dining hall, pining over name ideas. There happens to be an extraordinarily compelling class (to me) offered at Cornell  – during  Ayta’s freshman fall, she enrolled in MUSIC 2006: Punk Culture: The Aesthetics and Politics of Refusal. She suggested the title of the Dead Boys song, Sonic Reducers. Sebastian clarifies today that the name is sort of a joke, prodding at the comments they receive about being a Sonic Youth pastiche. Jackson expresses a different sentiment of the name, calling Dead Boys a huge inspiration. Sonic Reducers explain that they aren’t actually  Sonic Youth fanatics, remaining unfamiliar with their greater work. Teen Age Riot is a cool song though, Sebastian concedes. Luke’s father held nothing back in telling him that their song everything i hate about american cities sounds exactly like Kool Thing. Though maybe it’s better to be compared to Sonic Youth’s second most famous single than a Blink-182 cover band.

Sonic Reducers’ influences are a mix of rock sub-genres, melting together into the shape of their sound. Jackson’s drumming history is a colorful one that permeates the Sonic Reducers’ sound. As a fan of reggae, he borrows reggae drumming patterns and places them in a punk context. Having also played blues rock in high school, he affirms that his favorite music is old-school punk. Ayta japes, “What about Brand New?” He stands up to show his shirt, blushing in embarrassment because of the  singer’s scandal. Known today as “cancelled,” Jackson claims he doesn’t want to give them a platform, but Sebastian interjects with more banter, “Yeah just wear their sweatshirt!”

Sebastian confesses, albeit with pride, that he began learning the bass after agreeing to be a member of Sonic Reducers. He crafted the basslines for the debut album first on MIDI, almost as one composes music, and then purchased a bass over winter break 2018 to learn it on the instrument itself. The prominent, melodic bassline of Is This It? by The Strokes is his primordial inspiration for writing.

Luke Slomba stands as the main songwriter although each member adds to the sound. One song from his high school demo archive, cool hair, is on the record. Once a drum-machine and acoustic guitar diaristic indie song, now a ska-punk dynamic, throttling banger. The reworked final version combines Jackson’s eclectic drum style with the punk influences of Ayta. The combination of sounds and ideas shows the DIY harmony of Sonic Reducers. Luke did not name each song that was a demo of his, but expressed his wonderment with how the songs effloresced when they were revisited and recrafted.

The do-it-yourself atmosphere of Sonic Reducers coalesced through the recording process. The music program housing had several spaces for practicing and recording, however, time was precious and often, rooms were full of other students ribboning together their own creative endeavors. Once Sonic Reducers realized that they had a catalog of tunes, the next step was to begin recording the album. Some vocals were recorded in unorthodox spaces, such as those for supermarket, recorded at a desk in a tiny dorm room. Free time for Cornell students is sparse during the semester, so Jackson and Luke crafted a system of quick-learning. Luke would have an idea recorded from a drum machine, play it for Jackson, and after five minutes of listening they’d record takes for about an hour.

“We’d mic the drums, press record, put a metronome in, and record a song” Jackson and Luke detailed the simple process of drum recording, but perhaps the swiftness of learning relates to Jackson’s immense talent. Usually Luke would mic all of the instruments and record, but Sebastian took to the computer to produce and mix the record.

The recording process was wildly rushed, Luke joking that he didn’t really know why they were so adamant about mixing it by a particular date. They speak about this frenetic, frazzled time period with chuckles, Sebastian nonchalantly saying that he mixed the entire album for eight hours straight on a random Friday, not knowing anything that he was doing. I asked him how the experience felt, and he responded ironically with “I was just pretty tired after it.” There is a small jovial note at the bottom of their bandcamp page that reveals it was uploaded at exactly 3:22 A.M. The ungodly yet fairly normal hour for college students adds to the punk clumsiness and charm. Everyone agrees that the rushed mixing process gave the record a distinctive sound.

After the release of their self-titled debut album, Sonic Reducers played as many open-mics as they could. All of their eyes glow when Ayta mentions the Watermargin show of September 2019. At this performance lies the heart of Sonic Reducers lore; the candid, quirky, laid-back, fun vibe that radiates into the crowd. The cyber-chatter begins to overlap as each member jubilantly tells the story. This performance is luckily immortalized on Youtube, quickly discovered by searching Sonic Reducers Cornell. The video is recorded from a nearly front-row perspective, very close to the band. Everyone glistens with sweat, strumming with passion. The intimate camera angle never dips away to show the crowd, but the closeness makes you feel like you’re right there. About 11 minutes in is what the band calls their “legendary” moment: the La Croix supernova. Luke announces “now comes a special moment in our set.” Jackson brandishes the cans to the crowd well above his head and shouts jovially,“This concert is endorsed by La Croix! Zero calories!” The moment the cans pop and burst, Luke begins the intro to return to ithaca. Sebastian and Jackson toss the cans and join in. The timing is immaculate. Shotgunning seltzer and singing about the cold winter of Ithaca at a co-op on campus is a quintessential Sonic Reducers moment. It may have been their only full-band show, but it serves as inspiration for the upcoming shows once the world is not in a seemingly never-ending pandemic. Over this cloudy time they’ve done acoustic sets over Instagram live. The tantalizing, invigorating magic of live shows is a ways away, but Sonic Reducers continue to write punk songs that they wish to perform someday. The band admits that communication relating to the band has lessened over the past few months, even Sebastian joking “Wow we’re so good at being a band!”

Everyone has creative ideas brewing even though they haven’t met together in a while. Ayta actually announced an idea she hadn’t told the other members yet. An EP, tentatively titled 4D is a concept for four songs in the guitar tuning Drop D, a common tuning for punk and grunge music. Her bandmates are excited about this, mentioning ideas of including a cover they’ve done of a  Pavement song. It may be a triumph to get all of Sonic Reducers in a room together, but once they convene, punk magic occurs. The future is vast and welcoming to their passions, and so they will create and blossom.

Driven by his immutable sense of wonder, the Japanese techno, film and avant-garde musical giant is an indefatigable innovator.

At first glance, the 68-year-old Ryuichi Sakamoto exudes a professorial gravitas. He speaks in a rasping, measured tenor, and carries himself with an urbane reserve. From behind his tortoiseshell glasses, a sense of mystery permeates his steady gaze. Yet this severity and stillness belie his relentless exploration and unceasing sense of wonder which has propelled this pianist, composer and sound artist to the forefront of techno, film and avant-garde music over the course of his 40-year long career. Sakamoto has attained a rare longevity as part of the vaunted circle of maestros who have achieved what so many artists can only aspire to: a lifetime of artistic evolution and excellence. 

The title of his first solo effort, the experimental electronica album The Thousand Knives of Ryuichi Sakamoto (1985), was aptly chosen, for Sakamoto wields his disparate musical identities with aplomb. The movie-going public may most immediately associate him with the elegiac main theme of Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence (1983), in which he nurses a tender, minimalist opening refrain into a crescendo of yearning and emotion. More recently, Sakamoto made waves as the Grammy-nominated composer for Iñárritu’s harrowing 2015 epic, The Revenant. His other collaborations with the renown director Bernado Bertolucci, The Sheltering Sky (1990) and Little Buddha (1993), also earned critical acclaim. The highly decorated composer has won a Grammy, an Academy Award, a BAFTA award, a Grand Bell Award and two Golden Globes, in addition to an honorary Ordre des Arts et des Lettres from the French Ministry of Culture. 

But before he was a greying, even-keeled film scorer, he was the heartthrob keyboardist and vocalist of the hyper-stylized, gleefully experimental and mischievously ironic electropop band, the three-piece Yellow Magic Orchestra (1978). The notoriously private Sakamoto found himself an unwilling celebrity, as YMO grew “bigger than the Beatles” in Japan. YMO was formed to satirise and celebrate the exotica genre popularised by American bandleaders Martin Denny and Les Baxter, subverting the Orientalist gaze to make exotica from a Japanese perspective. They were the original cyberpunks, the trailblazers for early hip hop, Japanese city pop, new wave and house, inspiring a legion of followers whose numbers include Joe Hisaishi of Studio Ghibli fame, hip-hop pioneer Afrikaa Bambaataa, Michael Jackson, Quincy Jones and Eric Clapton. Over eight albums, YMO built lush, technicolour soundscapes with an array of rapidly evolving musical technology and ideas, replete with aesthetically committed music videos. Their music ranged from the sugary kitsch of “Rydeen,” where jittery 8-bit synths outlined melodic ideas from traditional Japanese folk over bouncing syndrum rhythms, to the lush, radio-friendly, 80s synth funk of “You’ve Got To Help Yourself,” to the club-ready acid house hit “Nanga Def.” Till today, we still hear the afterimages of YMO’s path breaking innovation in music as disparate as British techno and J-Pop. 

Sakamoto’s “butterfly punk” aesthetic 

Sakamoto has built a formidable personal brand as a producer, collaborator and solo artist, deftly drawing from the classical, jazz, pop, avant-garde and ambient traditions. David Sylvian, frontman of British New-Romantic act Japan, and Talking Heads and King Crimson guitarist, Adrian Belew, feature in his string of high profile collaborations. He demonstrates facility in the full spectrum of mediums, composing for solo piano, trio, orchestra, opera, multimedia installation, video games and the 1992 Barcelona Olympics to boot, even acting in Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence and The Last Emperor.

A charged moment with Sakamoto as Captain Yonoi and David Bowie as Major Jack Celliers in Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence

The dizzying variety of his discography traces his relentless professional evolution, which stands testament to his unabating curiosity and genuine sense of wonder at the unknown. He describes himself in a 2019 interview as a “hungry man with lots of curiosities.” “I listen to all types of music and all types of music excite me,” he said in a 2020 radio interview. The classically-trained Sakamoto recounted how he had torn through and tired of the classical canon by the end of high school, entering National Tokyo University of Fine Arts and Music for ethnomusicology and composition in hopes of making something new, informed by his diverse influences which ranged from Debussy to krautrock, with emerging musical technologies. 

Despite his mild-mannered conversational tone, Sakamoto does not shy away from taking controversial creative stances. He is a staunch individualist with a self-professed “strange personality” that resists being part of collectives preferring to work alone. Sakamoto rejects monozukuri, the widely revered and exoticised Japanese spirit of craftsmanship, arguing in a 2020 interview with the Financial Times that “true creativity is destructive… monozukuri is just polishing existing thinking” with a rare emotional pungence. He embraces destruction as crucial to creativity: in his radio interview he recounts how his second album B-2 Unit (1980) was born from the “urge to destroy the image I had with YMO” and one-time collaborator Aztec Camera describes Sakamoto as proactively building disruption into his workday, interrupting himself with ten minutes of house or hip hop “to corrupt what he knows… and to discover new things.” 

An expatriate musician writing for global audiences from his Manhattan apartment, Sakamoto is able to sit with cultural difference, describing “positive cultural shock” encountering punks in London in the 1980s in his Financial Times interview. “Shocking, but I really liked it,” he mused, modelling a non-judgemental curiosity and open-mindedness that would serve our multicultural societies well. Exploration is often seen as the province of the young, but Sakamoto has maintained this hunger for disruption, describing the radical, geometric musical approach of his long-time collaborator, alvo noto, with whom he toured in 2019, as “inspiring.”

Not all of Sakamoto’s exploration has landed well with critics. His 2000 performance at the Royal Albert Hall was panned by The Guardian as incomprehensible, a not uncommon criticism of experimental music. Sakamoto seems aware of this, astutely noting in his radio interview, “Just because it’s experimental doesn’t mean it’s good music.”  

The years have seen Sakamoto grow in his artistic maturity. He recalls how as a young upstart in film music, he wrote with single-minded focus on his music. He admitted that the poorer the film, the greater his incentive to write well to seize more of the spotlight. Now, he puts his music at the service of the film. Preferring an ambient, minimal approach in his recent work, Sakamoto seems to have put anthemic themes behind him. For Sakamoto the individualist, his prolific output of 24 soundtracks in the last 20 years represents a step out of his comfort zone, as he sees film music as a fundamentally collaborative act of musical translation. He confesses to the difficulty of satisfying multiple stakeholders in a 2016 interview, chuckling, “Literally every time I work on a film project, I say, this is it. This is it. No more soundtracks.” 

Sakamoto’s wide-ranging experimentation is complimented by his deep capacity for reflexive thought. He is keenly alive to the contradictions and idiosyncrasies of his creative pursuits. Rather than try to eke coherence out of his varied discography, he freely admits “When it comes to music I have a split personality,” comfortably straddling the division between analogue and digital, pop and experimental. Sakamoto counts the natural environment among his key inspirations. His 2017 biopic, Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda portrays his sensitivity to beauty and joyful experimentation with shots of him rambling through the forest and listening to the patter of rain with a bucket over his head, in search of stories and sounds for his work. “The world is full of sounds,” he insists. “We just don’t hear them as music.” Yet he holds that music is “unnatural.” In the aftermath of the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactor disaster, reflecting on an intact piano he found washed up by the tsunami, he saw parallels between nuclear power plants and pianos, both manipulating natural material into something unnatural. “If you think about it, the piano is a very unnatural instrument that was born from the Industrial Revolution,” Sakamoto puts forth in his radio interview. “There is a large plate of steel inside it… (and) about ten tonnes of force in the piano (from the strings).” The piano, ravaged by the tsunami, was not falling out of tune, as much as its warped wood and metal was trying to return to its natural state, the disaster having liberated it from the artificial imposition of mankind’s understanding of tonality. Music was akin to an abuse of nature. But for all this, Sakamoto declares that he needs to make music. “That’s the true desire. It’s contradictory, but somehow I have to survive through that.” 

Sakamoto’s concern with the natural and the unnatural goes beyond abstruse intellectual preoccupation. It’s a deeply felt, personal dilemma. Sakamoto was diagnosed with Stage III oropharyngeal cancer in 2014, which went into remission after a period of intensive radiotherapy, an excruciating period during which he could not work or even listen to music. He saw a connection between nature, the mangled piano and his own broken body, he shared with Slant Magazine in 2018. “Getting a disease is a process of nature. A tsunami and an earthquake are processes of nature. Being damaged by the force of nature is just another process.” This brought him solace but also doubt, he disclosed in his radio interview, if it was worth taking such extreme measures to prolong his life, to defy the course of nature. “But my desire to stay alive to make more music ended up being stronger.” 

Sakamoto examining a piano washed up by the deadly 2011 tsunami in Coda

In recent years, mortality has undoubtedly become a key creative focus. Pre-empting critics, he candidly offers in a 2018 Guardian interview, “It’s not sad. I just meditate about it.” In Coda he chases a “perpetual sound,” a musical symbol of immorality. Sakamoto may come across as cerebral, but his art, perhaps now more than ever, is grounded in his tender humanity. His latest solo effort, async (2017), is awash with haunting contemplation, the melancholy orchestral instrumentals and sampled textures coalescing into a fragile meditation on mortality. Through the gloom, he offers us the bittersweet, luminous rays of resolution – he quotes poet Arseny Tarkovsky on “Life, Life,” singer David Sylvian intoning “Life is a wonder of wonders, and to wonder / I dedicate myself.”

Sakamoto’s understated humour is a counterpoint to his somber reflections. His austere countenance, once set in motion in convivial conversation, lights up into a twinkling smile, suffused with a gentle warmth and hidden, almost childlike mirth. His humour tends towards wry, self-effacing impishness. Describing his upbringing as the son of an editor, he recounts in his 2018 Guardian interview, “(many) wannabe writers and novelists came to the house and there was a lot of drinking until the morning, and lots of books in the house, which we had to avoid so the piles didn’t collapse on us. Very cultural!” He reminisced about another episode in London, 1979, where he saw a trendy couple in a club dancing to his song, The End of Asia. “I just thought, ‘Wow! They are so fashionable and cool … but we were the ones that made them dance … so, wow, we must be really cool too!’” he recalled with glee in 2009. 

Sakamoto during a lighthearted moment at the 2019 Singapore International Festival of Arts 

Sakamoto has aged gracefully into a musical elder statesman, stepping out of his habitual reticence to employ his celebrity in service of anti-nuclear and copyright law advocacy, amongst other causes. Sakamoto spearheaded the international awareness campaign, Stop Rokkasho, to demand the closure of the Hamaoka Nuclear Power Plant in 2006 and was at the forefront of the anti-nuclear demonstrations after the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactor meltdown. In 2009, in an exclusive with The Guardian, he argued that copyright law was antiquated for the information age and a return to “tribal” attitudes towards music. 

Even after a prolific 40 years, Sakamoto is clearly not done yet. My only quibble with his biopic is that its title, coda, feels premature. His work since his return after his cancer went into remission does not read like a final triumphant recapitulation of his achievements, but the beginning of a new chapter, informed by new creative concerns. He is currently working on a new solo record and an opera, to be announced in 2021. 

Sakamoto is more than the man behind Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence. Throughout a back catalog spanning genres, collaborators and continents, Sakamoto has relentlessly reinvented himself. His artistic metamorphosis is born of an unsentimental, radical willingness to challenge his status quo, but also of his earnest reflection, his willingness to wade into what is most keenly felt and vital, and most of all, his immutable sense of wonder. Sakamoto is not ready to draw his musical odyssey to a close, declaring, “I’m seeking something new, something unknown to my ear.”