Listeners will remember Washington DC three-piece Sansyou best by their Japanese inspired 2011 EP, When We Become Ghosts, which constructed a post-rock narrative around the photography of ethnologist, Fosco Maraini, of 1960’s Honshu pearl divers. The result was an inherently introspective record laced with ambient post-rock sounds replicating the noises of the submerged and the seafaring with oceanic guitar tones.
Two years later, Sansyou (French for “Without You” but more contextually “Giant Salamander” in Japanese), have teamed up with Dallas label, Moon Sounds Records, hub of dark-wave, psychedelic, electronic and the experimental, and also home to Brooklyn psychedelic surf-punk crusaders, The Vandelles, to release The Dilettante.
The four-track release still embodies a lot of the post-rock production found on WWBG with multiple guitar layers and pedals, however, there is a little injection of neo-psychedelic influences, particularly on Three Ways of Being, which usher the trio into a renewed and exciting direction. And so it goes, the fleeting journey of the dilettante is one that leaves little room for introspection; he is a dabbler and he likes to explore the new. Sansyou’s experimental introduction to Moon Sounds Records bears a similar quality in its relationship – and hopefully this will be a long union between the two.
The Dilettante is now available through Moon Sounds Records.
