Best of What’s Next: Sen Morimoto
The Chicago indie-jazz artist talks navigating industry capitalism, the importance of community and his third album, Diagnosis.
Photo by Sammy Sutter
The music industry sucks. Touring feels like a rare luxury that still yields minimal living expenses. Avenues for independent music distribution are growing scarcer by the day. Predatory merch cuts mean artists don’t get the payout they deserve from venues. Live Nation and Ticketmaster are making it increasingly difficult for people without six-figure incomes to attend shows. There are fewer and fewer places to write about music, as billionaires buy publications without understanding what makes them special, and then lay off talented staff and use AI tools to write interchangeable SEO “content.”
It all feels like an inevitable byproduct of putative “late-stage” capitalism. Sen Morimoto, the Chicago-based indie artist, though, makes all this bleary malaise sound…fun? When Morimoto shouts “Fuck the cops, the banks, the legislature” on the fervently catchy “Diagnosis,” the title track for his third album, it belies the swirling, lively music that accompanies him. As Sonic Youth put it back in 1988, that combination of a playground for the 1% and a brutal wasteland for the remaining 99% is what makes America resemble a daydream nation.
Throughout the record’s 13 songs, Morimoto’s delightfully bizarre mix of acid jazz, funk and indie rock comes to life. Like if Fievel Is Glauque wrote longer songs, or the composer for Persona 5 made an indie album, Morimoto’s music is hooky, brazen and triumphant. In terms of how he has managed to fuse so many disparate styles into a cohesive whole, he attributes it to learning a genre on each instrument. “The way that I learned each instrument was in a different kind of band growing up,” Morimoto explains from his Chicago home via Zoom. “I learned drums playing in a punk band, and I learned saxophone while studying jazz. I learned guitar playing in an indie rock band. Those elements naturally come together because I don’t have another style in each of those instrumental languages.”
Thematically, most of Diagnosis concerns itself with the exploitation and systematic harm that comes from the music industry. It’s a subject that Sen Morimoto couldn’t help to avoid; as a DIY musician, he lives in it every day. When I ask him how he feels about putting this album out into the world, he’s perfectly candid. “Honestly, putting music out is really weird,” Morimoto admits. “A lot of artists, at least in my community and that I see online, are in this phase of figuring out where we land in the spectrum of capitalism or getting a sense of how things really work.” Capitalism both exploits artists for their work, yet it requires their participation in its system for them to make ends meet. As Morimoto sings on the chorus of the aforementioned title track, it’s a catch-22.