Antigone: Vinyl LP

Pre-Order Item. Release Date Subject to Change.
Label: Drag City
Release Date: 28th March

At once this sounds like the most chill and satisfying jazz pop records, tones of ambient electronics and light but skittering drums, a City Pop sound but with a rumbling in the sky, it's breezy and warm but that's the calm, the comforting smell of the tarmac before thunder cracks.

Antigone is a chilling look at our already-alternate reality, coming from inside Eiko Isibashi's own head. Her band brings a wide array of sounds and moods, shading pop, funk and jazz, ambient, electronic and musique concrète in a bittersweet latticework. Interlocking her new songs in seamless long-play flow with the compositional ambitions of her acclaimed soundtrack work, Eiko's expressions are epic and intimate. 2025 will never be the same!

Are we through the looking glass yet? It's 2025, and we're still waiting for the imperfect old world to turn into a super-sick brave new one. here's no shortage of raging clear-and-present dangers and fresh outrages for every calendar day – but nothing's ever scarier than what we, one of the insane, innovate to amuse ourselves. Take Antigone, Eiko Ishibashi's new album – a musical masterwork rife with chilling speculations, all calling from inside her own head!

For Antigone, her first album of songs with lyrics and singing since 2018's acclaimed The Dream My Bones Dream, Eiko teases out images from a dystopia not unlike the one we've already got. Hers is suffused with a ‘scene missing' quality, its continuity laced with sudden, odd details sprung like traps from within her music's smooth, expansive sound. Like these lines from “Coma”:

Covered with ashes, long winter,
Spring is yet to come
Candle and soap
Hold onto them tight and oppose gravity
This is your grid, watched by the security camera
You still have some time
to be a survivor in Eden.

Whatever's going on here doesn't feel linear, but it's not unfamiliar. It's a clash of context with Eiko's serene vocals and the well-appointed precision of the soundscape... uncanny, disturbing, not entirely okay. That's it working! And it keeps ticking like clockwork through the whole album.

An accomplished keyboardist/multi-instrumental composer and improviser, Eiko consolidates her conceptions throughout Antigone. On her early song-based albums – 2013's sci-fi-themed Imitation of Life and 2014's poptastic Car & Freezer, we sensed an album-oriented direction, built song by song into an inevitable whole. 2018's conceptually-united The Dream My Bones Dream allowed Eiko to tell stories closer to home. Her instrumental works since then – 2022's For McCoy (Black Truffle) and the soundtracks for Ryusuke Hamaguchi's films, Drive My Car and Evil Does Not Exist – have seen her diversity of musical ideas operating in an increasingly integrated long-form presentation.

With these transformative encounters in hand, Eiko and her band – drummer Tatsuhisa Yamamoto, bassist Marty Holoubek, Norweigan accordionist Kalle Moberg, Ermhoi on backing vocals, Joe Talia playing percussion and Jim O'Rourke on Bass VI, synths, etc – bring a wide array of sounds and moods to the songs here, referencing pop, funk and jazz, ambient, electronic and musique concrète in a seamless flow.

Antigone is a bittersweet look at our already-alternate reality, Eiko's jarringly personal vision glimpsed through a latticework of ambitious compositions and on-lock production techniques. At last! Now, the year 2025 will never be the same.

Track List:

Side A
October
Coma
Trial
Nothing As
Mona Lisa

Side B
Continuous Contiguous
The Model
Antigone