Kishi Bashi and the plants that set the tempo
Recorded live in Indianapolis with a plant ensemble wired into the circuit, five tracks and twenty two minutes in which the notes and the tempo belong to a money tree.
BY JOLT Staff · JUL 24 2026 · 2 min readKishi Bashi's record with Tall Tall Trees and the Sound Sanctuary is five tracks long, and the plants are not decoration. They set the underlying notes and the tempo. A synthesizer wired to the same circuit lets the humans shape what comes out of them through filters and small tonal adjustments. That is the arrangement, in the room and on the sleeve, and the reason this is its own record rather than another Kishi Bashi album.
K Ishibashi has recorded as Kishi Bashi since 2011: a violinist, a founding member of Jupiter One, a few years in of Montreal's band, then a solo catalogue that keeps finding a new system to write inside. 151a arrived on Joyful Noise in 2012, followed by Lighght, Sonderlust, Omoiyari and its song film, and Kantos in 2024. Handing the notes to a plant is a bigger move than it sounds, and he came to it sideways, with his wife, an environmental ethicist, in his ear, doubtful that the plants even know we are there.
“She's doubtful that the plants even know that we're there.”
The session was cut live on October 20, 2024, at the Church of Noise in Indianapolis, and it lands July 21 as the second of four Sound Sanctuary volumes on Joyful Noise, after Deerhoof in the spring, before JD Pinkus and Yoni Wolf. The ensemble is a money tree and four rubber trees. Electrodes on the leaves read changes in conductivity during photosynthesis and translate them to MIDI. Ishibashi plays violin, voice and piano, Mike Savino plays banjo, Tyler Watkins mixed and mastered, and Karl Hofstetter, who founded the label, calls the whole thing the opposite of AI.
'Acclimation' opens the record and takes its time settling: the playing follows a tempo it does not control, and when the tuning drifts it stays in the take. 'Respiration' is the other long piece, and it makes the record's case, holding one figure while the biological data moves underneath it. The conductance is structure, not texture; the music stands on it.
'Plantichrist' is the record's one joke, a title poking at his own 'I Am the Antichrist to You', and the only track here that wants to be funny before it wants to be still. Then the record thins out: 'Translocation' and 'Nyctinasty', named for the movement of sugars through a plant and for the way leaves fold at night. Both behave like process notes. They name something, and then they stop.
It is for the ambient end of the Joyful Noise catalogue, and for anyone who has followed Bashi's violin through the pop records and wondered what he does without a chorus. The short runtime is the right ask. Put it on in a room where you can hear the small stuff.
The flaw is authorship. The plants set the notes and the tempo and take the credit, but the players keep the filters, and 'Plantichrist' is where the split shows: the idea carries the track, and the track does not carry it back. One song in five. The rest earns the trade. This is a small record that could have been faked for a fraction of the effort, and the doubt running through it, his wife's and his own, is what keeps it honest. The plants never solo. They set the conditions, and everyone else has to keep up.
