A.G. Syjuco has an unusual background for someone making experimental rock in a Chicago studio. He is an award-winning producer, composer, and technologist who has spent his professional life sitting at the intersection of music and software development, working within a major multinational technology company while simultaneously building a reputation as one of the more distinctive voices in independent music. You may know him as the principal composer and producer behind Jack of None. Black Leather Birds is a different conversation entirely.
He launched the project during the pandemic in 2020 as a personal laboratory, somewhere to develop ideas that did not sync with the sonic identity of his collaborative work. The debut EP The Color of Memory arrived in March 2021 and established the project’s exploratory character. The music video for Our Angry Science went further, winning Best Experimental Music Video at both the Munich Music Video Awards and the International Sound Future Awards in New York. That kind of recognition for a video attached to an independent solo project is not nothing.
Now comes of Children and Their Sorceries, a five-track EP that is the most immersive and conceptually developed thing Syjuco has released under this name. The premise is literary. Themes of anxiety and existential dread are filtered through spoken word passages, prose poetry, and ritualistic chants that sit alongside more recognizable song structures. The whole thing plays out like a collection of short stories captured in sound, and the pacing is deliberate. This is not background music. It asks you to pay attention.
The Tracks
Nothing Ever Grows Here opens with dissonant angular guitar textures, pulsing bass notes, and shuffling drums building a haunting intensity before unnerving spoken word delivery amplifies the brooding atmosphere further. Then comes an abrupt shift into something breezy and jazz-tinged that functions as a genuine detour rather than a gimmick. Two distinct vibes held together by the confidence of the composition. It is a strong and unsettling entry point.
Monster pairs sparse piano plinks and dark vocal elements with hip hop rhythms that inject groove into the minimalism. It is an interlude in length but impactful in weight. Sometimes the smallest track on a record does the most structural work, and that is the case here.
The Box is the centerpiece and the track that has already drawn attention beyond the project’s existing audience. It introduces Gerald Mund, an ordinary man whose suburban afternoon is derailed by the arrival of a package bearing his name that refuses to be opened, ignored, or explained. The mundane becomes disquieting without ever fully explaining itself, and the avant-garde rock setting around that premise is packed with twists and turns that match the narrative tension. It is the kind of track that lingers long after it ends.
Almost arrives with downtempo drums, gliding bass lines, and melodic leads before pushing into metal-tinged energy and then pulling back into clean guitar tones with a lullaby quality and lilting rhythmic sway. The range of emotional registers covered across a single track is a demonstration of exactly how much ground Syjuco can cover without losing the thread.
Goodnight My Darling closes things with a heartbeat pulse met by jittery percussive shots and soft guitar plucks. It is a subtly playful instrumental finale that ends the EP on a note of quiet mischief rather than resolution, which feels entirely right for a body of work that has spent five tracks refusing to explain itself fully.
The Verdict
of Children and Their Sorceries is the record that makes it clear Black Leather Birds is not a side project in the dismissive sense of that phrase. It is a fully realized creative space where Syjuco does things he cannot do anywhere else, and on this EP he uses that freedom to build something genuinely unusual. The literary influences give it a conceptual spine that holds the experimental elements together, and the musicianship throughout is extraordinary.
This one deserves to find a wider audience.
of Children and Their Sorceries is out now. Follow Black Leather Birds for new releases.
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