PARTS by Che Chen & Patrick Shiroishi

Patrick and I first played together in the fall of 2020, when he was visiting New York from LA. It was under a bridge in Greenpoint, with me on double bass and him on alto. We both brought our zoom recorders but neglected to turn them on, which has been a source of mild consternation ever since. A year later he was back and we set up some mics in 75 Dollar Bill's basement practice space in Ridgewood, and remembered to hit record this time. We added some other horns, percussion and a 1/4" reel to reel machine with a loop in it to our battery of instruments and spent the afternoon recording. The files sat on my hard drive for another year, but when our friend Tashi Dorji invited us to Asheville for his edition of the Catalytic Sound Festival, we couldn't resist setting up a short tour down and back, and making this tape for the occasion. While that day under the bridge was definitively (A)LIVE--it was the first time I'd made music with another human being in person in the six or seven months since the pandemic started--the music on this tape is, like its cover, a collage, a sort of compacted multiverse of ourselves and our doubles, layered, spliced and dubbed over one another. We're on tour now, and it's more like it was under the bridge again, chasing the present every night, and feeling lucky to be able to do so. -CC, Durham, North Carolina

Che Chen is a creative musician and multi-instrumentalist interested in the overlapping fields of intuitive music, improvisation and tuning theory. In addition to the solo and collaborative projects here, he also plays guitar in the band 75 Dollar Bill, which he founded with percussionist Rick Brown in 2012. He is also a member of True Primes, and runs a small label called Black Pollen Press.