Source: All About Jazz.
Right place, right time, your scribe caught Smashing Humans playing a late night set at the original Nublu club in NYC’s Alphabet City, 19th April 2019. Intensity ensued, via a serrated prog-jazz extremity, sharply sculpted in its dynamic schizoid turning of sharp bends, its abrasive surface causing exciting distress. Smashing Humans were assembled by the Japanese violinist Sana Nagano, who’s now been dwelling in NYC since 2010, and in the USA for two decades. At that 2019 gig she may have seemed like an amazing new discovery, but it turns out that your scribe would have probably already witnessed her amongst the swollen ranks of the Creative Music Studio or Adam Rudolph’s Go:Organic Orchestra. Nagano styles herself as a ‘noise violinist,’ and indeed her riffs and solos are often heightened by a bright neon distortion haze, but her instrument does also sound very much like a violin, most of the time.
Avant Music News 