JOSIAH STEINBRICK - For Anyone That Knows You

For Anyone That Knows You, an album of mostly piano solos by Josiah Steinbrick, was recorded not for smoothness or posterity but to emphasize the piano as object, the person playing it, and the moment it sounds. On three of the pieces, the saxophone of Sam Gendel hovers over the piano like a faint change in the light, adding resonance and gentle reinforcement rather than counterpoint. Three others are delicate renditions: “Green Glass” interprets an untitled recording by Quechuan folk musicians Leandro Apaza Romas and Benjamin Clara Quispe; “Elyne Road” abbreviates one of Malian kora master Toumani Diabaté’s most tender compositions; and “Lullaby” is an arrangement of a traditional Creole song, originally recorded in 1954 by the Haitian-American guitarist Frantz Casseus.

Biography

The many-faceted career of composer, producer and multi-instrumentalist Josiah Steinbrick (b. 1981) begins in the industrial but lushly overgrown landscapes of Providence, Rhode Island. Although he was born of bohemian parents and grew up in the spiritual vibrancy of one of America’s largest Portuguese-speaking immigrant communities, Steinbrick’s early education was geared towards a working-class, vocational life. While picking up a guitar at the age of 13 he had a vivid awareness that only a mile from his door lurked a seemingly alternate universe. Dropping out of middle school and leaving home, he spent his time instead in the Fast Forward record shop, Newspeak bookstore and especially the underground DIY art space/venue/ commune Fort Thunder, home of local acts Lightning Bolt and Forcefield. Although his music today seems a long way from such noise rock origins, he says that Providence’s “brand of abandon and cinematic nature” still informs a large element of what he creates.

On moving to Los Angeles, he met then up-and-coming producer Danger Mouse (Brian Burton). Bonding over their record collections, and impressed with some home recordings Steinbrick played him, Burton hired him as a session musician, and inadvertently offered a unique view of an auteur in his exploratory prime. Steinbrick says “There are still things I do in the studio to this day where I have his voice in my head … my experience as an artist would be wildly different without him.” Soon after, he met another important collaborator, Devendra Banhart, eventually joining his band. A shared love for left-field pop and “music that sounds like nothing is happening” (in tandem with becoming instrumentalist of choice for Banhart’s producer Noah Georgeson) resulted in Steinbrick contributing bass, drums, percussion, and synth arrangements to Devendra’s album Mala (2013). That same year, he also began working with Welsh artist Cate Le Bon, convincing her to come to Los Angeles to record her third album Mug Museum, which Steinbrick and Georgeson co-produced. Over the following years, Steinbrick produced another album by Banhart (2016’s Ape in Pink Marble) and two more by Le Bon (Crab Day, 2016, and the Mercury Prize-nominated Reward, 2019).

Steinbrick also formed the group Banana in 2014, with the Brazilian songwriter Rodrigo Amarante. Initially conceived as a way to play records in specific settings (its first event was as part of a three-week art series in an abandoned building) and with a performance element made up of members of Le Bon’s band, it developed almost accidentally into a forum for Steinbrick to explore his own compositional voice for the first time. A studio session was recorded for Dublab radio in Los Angeles and released by Leaving Records in 2017. While “everything about Banana had aleatoric or accidental roots,” Steinbrick says, it gave him the impetus to begin releasing music under his own name for the first time. That spirit continued in Steinbrick’s first solo release, Meeting of Waters (2017), a textural dream-suite consisting of “a lot of metal and wood” and a single synthesizer. In order to retain its impulse, he prepared little and worked almost spontaneously, capturing each layer in a single take. Produced by Le Bon, it was recorded in less than a week. His second solo record, Liquid/Devotion & Tongue Street Blue (2020) allowed elements of this process while exploring a wider range of bass, harmonic processing, and polyrhythm. Mouthfeel/Serene with Sam Gendel followed shortly after, comprised of reassembled 2018 improvisations inspired by Teo Macero’s editing techniques on Miles Davis’ Get Up with It and On the Corner.

Sam Gendel also features on Steinbrick’s latest album of mostly solo piano compositions, For Anyone That Knows You. Though it was recorded in a single day, For Anyone That Knows You had a more refined and intentional compositional process than any of Steinbrick’s previous work, and, despite its soft edges and sparse textures, it retains a raw immediacy and sense of DIY experiment that echoes down from those teenage days at Fort Thunder.