Pijama Piyama plays Viva PHX on April 17

Phoenix-based Pijama Piyama has just released its second full-length album, Lazer Moon Vol. 1, a fully loaded sensory experience.

The 10-song journey, where cumbia and psych rock combine with pure energy, keeps you in motion until the end. While your body may get locked in the twisty grooves and hooks, your mind goes on its own hop-about, pivoting through the layers from one sonic burst to the next; they’re non-stop and ever-clever.

It’s the perfect soundtrack for losing yourself and for taking your time winding your way back. Go all in, close the windows, lock the doors, dance your ass off, and let your brain get twisted. Then, catch them live at Valley Bar on April 17 when they play as part of the Viva Phx music festival with Sgt. Papers, Parque De Cometas, and Mannequins.

Jonathan Saillant got this ball rolling back in 2019. He’s from Arizona but moved to Chicago that year, to try life in a different city, and due to the pandemic, found himself more homebound. Not exactly the time to mix and mingle in a new place.

“I was locked down, but it sort of ended up working out,” Saillant laughs. “I ended up just writing a lot more; I was locked down out there for two years, more than two years. So I really didn’t have anything else to do.”

He’s been making music since age 10, when he started playing the piano.

“I started there and then switched over to guitar and drums. Now I play keys, but it’s not my primary instrument.”

He headed back to the desert in 2022 and was ready to put things into action. At that point, he had a little familial help.

“It started with my brother. He was someone I had been sharing the music with, and he understood it and thought it was cool. Neither of us had performed in a while, so it was like an easy motivation there to say, ‘Let’s start something.’”

“However, even with having the music written, I’d been out of town for enough time that I had to reconnect with people and see who was free. I pulled from who I knew was available, and then I just booked a show to get things running,” he laughs.

It’s a classic band move to get from point A to point B. A true motivator. And it worked for him. “That’s sometimes how it is,” he says.

Saillant is the group’s primary songwriter, but everyone helps shape each track.

“It starts that way, with me, with a pretty distinct composition, and then it opens up and people take their liberties, and a lot of what happens is dictated by everyone’s strengths and how we want to form the song in a live setting. It’s very collaborative.”

Currently, the band’s lineup is Jonathan Saillant (guitar, keys, vocals), Mert Salahi (guitar), Nico Paco (vocals, auxiliary percussion), Angelita Ponce (Congas, percussion, vocals), Jessie Demaree (clarinet, vocals), Ben Wise (drum set), and Chris DelFavero (bass).

I share with Salliant that I started hearing a lot about the group while I was working out of town, and it was exciting — from afar — to see the enthusiasm for this Phoenix group doing cumbia and getting audiences caught up in their groove.

“We are definitely grateful for it. Part of the inspiration behind the stuff I write is directly about my environment, and I was thinking, ‘I want to hear this, and this would be cool if there was something like this happening in my city. So, then, it was nice to know that it was exciting for other people.”

He says that while it was a surprise, upon more thought, it wasn’t, really.

“I think we, people, tend to think it’s going to be a surprise to have something people relate to. But, usually, a lot of times, we learn that our ideas are not as insular as we might have thought they were. Also, as people, we all have our self-doubts and such, so it’s all just really nice that people like it.”

“Phoenix,” he adds, “has a really good community. It’s fun to know that it’s exciting for people, and that makes me excited to try new things and fill that space for myself by experimenting with things. It’s cool that (the scene) is really open to that.”

Pijama Piyama has been touring, too, and spreading their musical joy most recently around Southern California. Saillant is just as happy about that.

“It was great. We went out there with a group called Spaghetti Cumbia, which we’ve come to befriend and have done a couple of tours with. They have a really good thing going over there, and we get the joy of sharing each other’s little niche communities. They’re a fun local band that people are excited to go see. We get to be met by their people who are just as kind and fun as the community here, and then it’s vice versa when they play here with us.”

Digging into Lazer Moon Vol. 1 a bit, I ask Saillant if the recording process for this newbie involved any new approaches.

“This one was very much dictated by the approach,” he confirms.

“Normally, we record live to tape and get full band recordings. There’s still some of that, but this one was a lot more programmed — programmed drumming or drum sounds — that I made, and then running that to tape and amping it to create an almost live room sound. Then, we played over that as a band, layering it with percussion, guitars, vocals, and all of the stuff. We had always been analog, and we still wanted to do that, but we also wanted to have some of the nuances of electronic sounds or just things that are difficult to do live-to-tape.

He admits that it wasn’t love at first listen.

“It took me a while to sit with it,” he laughs. “It was an experiment to see if I could get the same sort of feeling like a live take but not have live instruments, per se, and the whole process. And I don’t know how novel what we did was, but it was definitely an experiment for us in that studio and for the engineer we worked with (who we’ve worked with before). I just didn’t know how it would come out. I’m happy with it, and we learned a lot about imagining how some things will work and how they actually work.”

Saillant’s approach is inspirational and productive. It can be tremendously hard to take chances and sit with the results. He leans toward gratitude for the experience.

“The process of finding out is in itself gratifying. I could look at it one way and say that it didn’t go quite as I wanted, but on the other hand, there’s the fun of experimenting, and that did certainly happen, which in itself is gratifying.”

You can check it out on their Bandcamp page and watch for upcoming shows and more of the tunes in their style that Saillant compares to magical realism in literature.

“Our songs are storytelling with real-life messages, yet still detached from reality in some ways.”