kazaizen returns with a bold, shape-shifting statement of intent on Sky Fish Fly, a 13-track album that refuses to sit comfortably inside any one genre. The project of Saint Paul-based multi-instrumentalist Jonny Kasai, kazaizen continues to expand a sonic language that threads psychedelic rock, alternative soul, experimental pop and fragmented jazz into something restless and immersive.
Across its roughly 35-minute runtime, Sky Fish Fly behaves less like a traditional album and more like a drifting transmission that constantly mutates its own signal. Moments of hazy calm dissolve into dense, textured bursts of sound as if the record is being assembled in real time from shifting memories, radio static and half-remembered grooves.
Critics have previously noted the project’s hybrid identity, with SPIN highlighting its blend of “Prince-style vocals with Brainfeeder-style experimentation”, while Pop Fantasma has described it as lo-fi psychedelia where city pop, 70s and 80s FM soul, jazz and shoegaze blur into one another. That collision of references is not just aesthetic but structural. Sky Fish Fly builds its world out of friction between eras, moods and production styles, constantly folding the past into something unstable and newly assembled.
Tracks like ‘Nanoo Nanoo’, ‘Make It Love’ and ‘What’s the Meaning – Self’ move with a disorienting, almost centrifugal energy, like being spun through a psychedelic machine where funk, jazz phrasing and fractured pop hooks collide. ‘What Is’ leans further into nostalgia-as-transformation, channeling the feeling of a lost 70s soul recording resurfacing through degraded tape before being reshaped into a vivid, modern collage.
Elsewhere, ‘State of Mind’ edges toward shoegaze, building dense walls of sound from layered vocals, samples, keys and submerged guitar textures. The result is not heaviness for its own sake but a kind of immersive blur, music that feels both expansive and enclosed at once. ‘Beyond the Stars’ drifts into space-leaning soul, while ‘Somewhere Somethings Waiting’ pushes into progressive synth-jazz terrain, full of restless harmonic turns and elastic rhythm.
One of the album’s most unusual detours arrives with ‘Mr. Musk’, a playful, satirical spiral that imagines Elon Musk’s journey to Mars meeting psychedelic Martian life before gently returning him to Earth. It is emblematic of kazaizen’s approach. Narrative ideas are less fixed stories than launch points for sonic experimentation, where humour, abstraction and texture coexist without needing resolution.
Throughout the record, Kasai expands kazaizen’s palette further into psychedelic R&B and experimental soul, weaving together echo-laden guitars, warm analogue synths and fluid, emotionally direct melodies. Working independently, his process is intentionally open-ended. Songs begin as fragments of groove, tonal sketches or melodic impressions before being built outward into fully formed but fluid compositions.
At its core, Sky Fish Fly is less concerned with genre than with perception. It treats music as atmosphere and vibration, something that shifts how space and emotion are experienced rather than simply delivered as songs. The result is a record that feels simultaneously lo-fi and lush, grounded and otherworldly, familiar and subtly unplaceable.
With Sky Fish Fly, kazaizen does not just blur boundaries, it dissolves them entirely, leaving behind a kaleidoscopic field where sound is always in motion and always becoming something else.
Listen below:
