Johs & John – Johs & John 1
Building on nearly a decade of friendship, with an evolving creative
partnership spanning roughly half that time, Swedish/Australian
synthesist, John Chantler, and Danish saxophonist, Johannes Lund, return
with Andersabo, their second outing as a duo.
An intricate, thrillingly unbridled blast of carefully controlled sonic
anarchy, pushing at the perceptual boundaries of conversant sound,
Andersabo captures the collision of two sympathetic, but often radically
different, creative pursuits - Chantler’s subtle complexity, composing
for electronics, modular synthesis, and acoustic instruments, and Lund’s
full tilt constructions for various saxophones, pointedly defying long
standing expectations and syntaxes applied to his chosen instrument — in
open dialog with landscape beyond.
Recorded during the summer of 2019, while the duo were on a residency in
rural Sweden, the LP’s three works present a radical rethinking of
aural collectivism. Each is a space within which the environment and its
many actors — the floorboards of a barn, a grassy field, distant hills,
insects, the pulse of an electric fence, or a passing tractor, threaded
with the tones and responses of Lund’s saxophone and Chantler’s pump
organ and synth — are given equal presence and voice. A clear,
conceptual extension of both artists’ long standing pursuits of
collaboration and the building of context, whether creatively or as
facilitators, notably via Chantler’s Edition Festival in Stockholm, and
Lund’s work within the Danish community as a founder of the legendary
space, Mayhem. Andersabo represents a rigorously forward thinking
rendering of utopian sound, inextricable from the joy, playfulness, and
humour with which it was made. Two artist bound by friendship,
dramatically opening the sense of creative possibility for the next.
A poignant reminder that art and its making, as serious as it is, can be
thrilling, adventurous, and fun, the album’s opener, Back of the House,
weaves an immersive and emotive tapestry of dancing texture and tone
where the identity of generative sources flutter in and out of view,
stripped of hierarchy. Shifting gears with the final minutes of the
first side of the LP, Open Field & Forest packs a remarkable density
into its length. Long, harmonic tones of a pump organ fall within a
cavernous landscape, captured from beyond the farmhouse walls, its
breadth riddled with unplaceable rumbles, clatters, and chirps, giving
way as the animalistic howl of saxophone takes hold. With Under Barn
Floor, stretching across the entirety of the LP’s second side, Chantler
and Lund depart into a gripping, abstract portrait of time and place.
Playfully pushing at the conceptual boundaries of drone, the hand of the
artists rise and fall as the low frequencies of the bass saxophone and
Chantler’s synthesized organ tones are challenged with interventions of
insect sounds and countless, happenstance incidents, dancing with
electronically generated images of themselves. A journey toward the
future, locked within a discrete moment in time, which culminates as a
collective intervention between voice, geography, ideas, and chance.
An unpredictable bridge between acoustic and electronic composition and
field recording, Andersabo offers a remarkable image of the rewards
found through friendship, community, and uninhibited experimentation.
