EPK — Sontag Shogun

“This avant-garde trio use piano, samples, and carefully skewered tapes to conjure an evocative sense of place. They drift to exquisite effect.”

— Pitchfork

about us

Sontag Shogun is an experimental trio known for textured collages of rising intensity that blend minimal piano compositions with an evolving array of tapes, tones, vocals, effects, and a surprising number of kitchen utensils.

quick hits

In the past few years, Sontag has been featured on Pitchfork, NPR, The Wire, Bandcamp Daily, KEXP, and more, as well as Spotify’s Fresh Finds & New Ambient and Apple Music’s Headspace, Piano + Electronics, & Pure Focus playlists. You can hear also hear their music on Apple TV’s Platonic.
They’ve toured extensively across Japan, China, Europe, and North America — and performed at internationally renowned festivals including Frameworks Festival (Munich), NY Art Book Fair at MoMA PS1 (NYC), Eufonic Festival (Barcelona), Suoni Per il Popolo (Montréal), WOS Festival (Santiago de Compostela), 24-Hour Drone Festival (Hudson), Jue Music & Arts (Shanghai), Bemis Center for the Arts Experimental Series (Omaha), Mono No Aware (Brooklyn), and others.
They’ve collaborated live and on recordings with artists such as Lau Nau, Julia Kent, Matana Roberts, Tom Carter, Stijn Hüwels, Fly Pan Am, Moskitoo, Greg Fox, and others — and shared the stage with Hauschka, This Is Not This Heat, Jerusalem in my Heart, Aki Onda, Maggi Payne, The Primitive Calculators, Christopher Tignor, and others.

full-length releases

Päiväkahvit with Lau Nau (2025, Beacon Sound). Named among “best new albums” June 2025 by NPR.
Valo Siroutuu with Lau Nau (2022, Beacon Sound), with art book (VINYL SOLD OUT). Called “one of the year’s most enchanting collaborative records” by Foxy Digitalis.
It Billows Up (2019, Youngbloods), with art book (SOLD OUT). “On It Billows Up, humanity meets the rest of nature and is given a musical score: disparate forces forming a fragile harmony.” - Richard Allen, a closer listen
Patterns for Resonant Space (2017, Youngbloods) (VINYL SOLD OUT). “Sontag Shogun songs are like environments to float through, lost in hushed wonder.” - Pitchfork

process & performance

Sontag Shogun are known in part for their collaborative process, a process that emphasizes improvisation and sonic discovery over pristine sounds or pre-packaged digital tools. Yes, the group composes with piano, but also with the sounds of nature, of objects in movement, of manipulated tape, of error and edit and decomposition, of experience. Their compositions are often built organically and weave in things like field recordings, live captured radio signals, oscillators tuned by hand, improvised vocal loops, live sampling, and magnetic tape loops that evoke a sense of place and connection.

You can get a sense of their approach in this live performance from Brooklyn, 2023:

our story (the longer version)

Sontag Shogun is an experimental trio consisting of long-time friends Jeremy Young, Jesse Perlstein, & Ian Temple. We started making music together in our apartment in Montréal in 2007, and have since released 5 full length albums of increasing ambition, as well as multiple EPs, and toured all over the world, including Europe, Japan, China, and North America.

What sets Sontag apart is the approach to exploring sound and creation. Our stage show features soundscapes produced by miking organic materials such as sand, slate, water, brush, or dried leaves. We love a weather ¼” tape and an old-timey tuned oscillator. But we also love anchoring these sonic explorations with nostalgic piano compositions and vocals, sometimes with digital effects processing for abstraction. What memories will be stirred in the audience by a passing reference to something that’s recognizable but in an entirely new context?

We are in a constant state of exploration. We have improvised alongside artists as diverse as Lau Nau, Moskitoo, Matana Roberts, Julia Kent, Oren Ambarchi, Greg Fox, Shinya Sugimoto, Tom Carter, Diana Combo and Aki Onda as well as poets, choreographers, butoh dancers, filmmakers, an improvised fashion designer, a collective of Japanese contemporary video artists, slide projectionists, and scentscape installation artists.

We’ve been Hans Appelqvist’s backing band, we’ve done weddings, we’ve performed with a string quartet at MoMA, we’ve performed in 40 speaker channels with a live 360 mix, we’ve scored short films and curated live film scoring evenings, we’ve recorded sections of Meriwether Lewis’ 1804 journal, we’ve played during a performance installation of a giant 18-foot living flower sculpture, we’ve scored an old-timey baseball game in Brooklyn, and opened (somehow) for legendary post-punks The Primitive Calculators and This Is Not This Heat on separate occasions.

Sontag Shogun is:

Ian Temple: piano, organ, production. Ian also runs online music school Soundfly, having worked with Kimbra, Son Lux, Com Truise, Kiefer, Elijah Fox and many others, and writes a popular music-related Substack.
Jeremy Young: tapes, oscillators, amplified objects & surfaces. Jeremy also records and performs solo under his own name and as part of the duo Cloud Circuit, and edits the popular music blog Hypebot.
Jesse Perlstein: treated vox, field recordings, electronics. Jesse curates a weekly radio show for KPISS, writes scores for podcasts, and releases music in a variety of other projects, including solo and with AxOxH and others.