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Oct 31, 2023 By Mark Redfern

Chicago-based Japanese American multi-instrumentalist Sen Morimoto is releasing his third studio album, Diagnosis, this Friday via City Slang, in partnership with his own Sooper Records. Now he has shared another song from it, “Pressure on the Pulse,” via a music video. Morimoto directed the video with New Trash and it’s considered the third part in a trilogy of videos. The video stars Chicago comedy, drag, and music icon Alex Grelle. Watch it below, followed by Morimoto’s upcoming tour dates.

A press release describes the video in more detail: “The final installment of the trilogy ‘Pressure on the Pulse’ finds an evil record label executive (Alex Grelle) celebrating the profits of Sen’s posthumous album streams in an unhinged dance sequence, even as Morimoto resurrects from the dead. With visual references to films like Phantom of the Paradise, Clerks, and The Crow, the visual universe of Diagnosis calls back to MTV era Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry music videos, using humor to balance and deliver the album’s earnest message.”

Morimoto previously shared the album’s first single, “If The Answer Isn’t Love,” which was featured on our Songs of the Week. When the album was announced, he shared its title track, “Diagnosis,” via a music video. The song was also one of our Songs of the Week. Then he shared another song from it, “Deeper,” which was also one of our Songs of the Week.

When explaining this album’s aim, Morimoto said in a previous press release: “I’ve now released a couple of albums in a time when the most commercially exploitable asset an artist has is their social identity and their trauma. Over this time the discussion of this pattern has come up repeatedly with peers who felt similarly tired of being expected to share every private detail of an immigrant household or to romanticize the struggle of their working class upbringing only to find questions on the craft itself reserved for artists without those burdens. While the songs on my third album range in topic from love to radicalization to spirituality and the internal effects of life under capitalism, every song on Diagnosis is, at its core, an attempt to flip the lens around. To hold a magnifying glass over the systems we live in and empower us to investigate them with the same scrutiny.”

Sen Morimoto Tour Dates:

11/10 @ Icehouse - Minneapolis, MN
11/11 @ James Theatre - Iowa City, IA
11/25 @ Thalia Hall - Chicago, IL
11/29 @ The Drake - Amherst, MA
12/01 @ Milkboy - Philadelphia, PA
12/02 @ Elsewhere Zone One - Brooklyn, NY
12/07 @ El Cid - Los Angeles, CA

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