It’s no longer an aberration for artists to collaborate in the cloud, given the ease with which most of the world accesses high-speed internet. And A Sunny Day In Glasgow—collectively based in Philadelphia, Brooklyn and Sydney, Australia—creates the sort of impressionistic guitar pop that feels ripe for working in the ether. But that doesn’t mean the process of writing fine new album Sea When Absent (Lefse) across three cities and two hemispheres was ideal. In fact, the method was so present that it became a centerpiece of its narrative. The band will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our new feature on the band.
Jen Goma: Bread is one of my favorite foods. I like putting butter on bread, and that’s probably one of the best things I can think to eat. And bread and butter is just about tied in my mind with onigiri. If you’ve never had it, onigiri is a ball of rice wrapped in seaweed. I usually know it in a triangle shape, but you can put a little bit of salt on your hands to flavor the rice as you roll it into a ball and then wrap some dried seaweed around it, and that still counts. It’s a Japanese comfort food that I remember eating with instant ramen growing up, but it’s been around for a long time. There are records of samurai carrying balls of rice in the 17th century and members of the Imperial Court eating rice balls in the 11th century. Now they are in almost any convenience store in Japan and many Japanese markets across America, with a lot of different fillings like salted fish or pickled ume (umeboshi). Friends from Japan have said that it’s a funny thing for onigiri to be a favorite food, because they are so simple and commonplace. They said it was like saying bagels were my favorite food. But, I think their quotidian simplicity is one of the reasons why I love them. And they also taste really good.
