We Speak Music
‘Sky Fish Fly’ by kazaizen: Where Soul Meets Psychedelia
kazaizen’s Sky Fish Fly feels less like a traditional album and more like a living organism—constantly mutating, shifting shape, and inviting listeners deeper into its curious, kaleidoscopic world. Jonny Kasai’s genre-defying project has always thrived on exploration, but here, that instinct is sharpened into something remarkably cohesive despite its eclectic sprawl.
Clocking in at a concise 35 minutes, the album wastes no time in establishing its sonic language. Tracks like “Nanoo Nanoo” and “Make It Love” revel in groove-driven psychedelia, their rhythms looping hypnotically while layers of instrumentation ebb and flow around them. There’s a looseness to the compositions, but never at the expense of intention.
A sense of temporal dislocation runs throughout. “What Is” plays like a memory half-remembered, its 70s soul influences filtered through tape-warp textures and collage-like production. Meanwhile, “What’s the Meaning – Self” channels city-pop shimmer, but destabilises it with unexpected shifts and playful melodic detours.
The record’s second half leans into more expansive, exploratory terrain. “State of Mind” edges into shoegaze, constructing dense sonic walls from unconventional sources, while “Beyond the Stars” and “Somewhere Somethings Waiting” stretch into cosmic soul and progressive synth-jazz respectively. Each track feels like a new corridor branching off an already labyrinthine structure.
What makes Sky Fish Fly resonate is its ethos. Kasai’s process—starting from fragments and allowing songs to evolve organically—results in music that feels alive, searching. It’s an album about perspective shifts, about embracing the unknown. In that sense, its genre ambiguity isn’t just aesthetic—it’s philosophical.
“With Sky Fish Fly, kazaizen invites listeners on a journey through sound that’s playful, introspective, and utterly fearless,” says music publicist Danielle Holian, Decent Music PR. “Jonny Kasai blends psychedelic soul, shoegaze, jazz, and city pop into a universe where every track feels alive, like flipping through a cosmic radio dial at midnight. It’s music that’s lo-fi, immersive, and impossible to categorise, but impossible to forget.”
Michele Ducci has unveiled the second single, ‘Woman Like You’, from his forthcoming album and animated film ‘Snail in the Clouds’.
‘Woman Like You’ pairs bright distorted electric guitar with an electronic drumbeat, adding in Ducci’s soulful vocals and a catchy uplifting chorus with Letizia Mandoleisi’s sweet vocal harmonies. A vintage organ pedalboard operated by Ducci simultaneously generates chords, bass and rhythm, like a one-man band. Shane Kennedy (Girl in the Year Above) joins in on guitar. Simon Milner (Is Tropical, Ysing) recorded and produced the track at his 4am Studios in London.
The album and film tell the story of a planet called ‘Snail’, inhabited by hybrids – primarily a mixture between scorpions, snails and humans – who lead a life according to the style of Pythagoras, devoted to music. There is also a cloud man named Agostos, a writer of musical operettas, who together with a talking smoke machine called Doctor Subtilis, begins to kill all hybrids, targeting in particular the hybrid musician Diodoros and his band, in an effort to steal the ark of melodies, an ancient ship that allows the whole planet to survive with music and joy.
The video for the single, created and animated by Ducci and Mandoleisi, delves further into the realm of planet ‘Snail’:
Says Ducci, “The ark of melodies, after various attempts, finally starts to work and fly in the planet Snail, while the shady Doc. Sub. and Agostos, with their platoon of soldiers made of foggy smoke, spy the miracle, planning to steal the ark for their evil and tyrannical purposes.”
About the track, Michele says, “I wrote this song for my love Letizia. Love seen from the mind is the sound we make. Sound is the love of matter.
We used a Technics synthesizer organ from a flea market. I tried to find a mood that was right for the song and I started using the bass of the pedal board together with the synth and the drums, and it was magical to hear the song reveal itself all coming from a single instrument. Leti was singing with me and we recorded everything live in one shot. Then we made Shane do the guitar flight, as if he came out of the window. The idea was to maintain disproportions, guitar thrust and synth drum thinness a la Haroumi Hosono, so as to create an estrangement, but naturally: it’s about how I listen, with close up something that captures me in its nuance as element of a larger orchestra somewhere. I’m glad we decided in the studio with Simon to use the layers of arrangement as the close-ups in the cinema; they look like strange enlargements that perch on parts of a mutated orchestra. I’m happy to come back with this love song at a time when everything seems to opt, even my labor in managing the flows of selfishness that have poured out on me while doing this album, for the sound of war. I’m here happy to be able to say that the sound of love always wins as did for me. Snail in the clouds is one of the most important works in my life and I am glad to start from pure love for this album that is my son.”
The album and full-length film will be released on the 5th of June on Monotreme Records.
Michele and Letizia’s previous musical short film, ‘The Great Book of Nature’, is an official selection for the 2026 Venice Shorts Film Festival.
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