Music Review: John Chantler - Tomorrow Is Too Late
Music Review: John Chantler – Tomorrow Is Too Late
John Chantler
Tomorrow Is Too Late
[Room40; 2019]
Rating: 3.5/5
Culled from John Chantler’s 2018 GRM Studios residency sessions on a 1966 François Coupigny Synthesizer (restored to 14 of its original 24 modules), the artist could be forgiven if the engagement didn’t produce an oeuvre-worthy recording. Luckily, this one-time drummer/BoC fan found a way to learn the Coupigny on a modest but…
John Chantler preps new album Tomorrow Is Too Late for Room40, sagely shares track excerpt today
Swedish composer John Chantler is set to release a new set of sounds circa 2019, titled Tomorrow Is Too Late, via Room40.
His latest weaves experimental synth and hypnotic drones that form two lengthy “interrogations into sound” spread across forty minutes. His last album on Room40 was 2016’s Which Way To Leave?.
Scope an excerpt of the title track below, and check out Room40 for pre-order info…
John Chantler — Logic Being the Lowest Form Of Magic; John Chantler — Move Along, Nothing Here to See; John Chantler/Steve Noble/Seymour Wright — Front and Above (1703 Skivbolaget)
Logic Being The Lowest Form of Magic by John Chantler
When it comes to ways and means, John Chantler is a slippery guy. Some might recall his older recordings on Lawrence English’s Room40 label, his membership in the duo For Barry Ray or his past work as a talent wrangler and dogsbody at Café OTO. Nowadays the Australian expatriate lives in Stockholm, Sweden, where he organizes the annual Edition Festival. On these three recent releases, Chantler moves between formats, music production methods and geographical locations. What ties them together is Chantler’s understanding of sound as a life-like force that can be invoked, invited and guided, but never quite controlled.
Logic Being the Lowest Form Of Magic is an album-length, download-only release that Chantler developed over a year and a half at electronic music studios in three countries to be played at Audiorama, a 21-speaker listening space in Stockholm. Boiled down to a stereo mix of reed organ drones and fluctuating Serge synthesizer tones, it remains an immersive piece of music, albeit one that depends upon the listener to run it through some decent speakers. The sounds accumulate like tumbleweeds against a fence, building up and bustling around, and the piece’s 36-minute duration gives one plenty of time to notice first the grain of each sound and then the way layers give way to more layers. The listening experience replies to the title’s unanswered question — what forms of magic are higher than logic? They are legion, and among them is the sensate experience of sound as it washes over and through your body, transforming your emotional and physical state and perhaps your spiritual orientation as well. Stray thought — the day we melt our weapons down to build a surround-sound, communal listening space in every town is the day we will know that humanity really can transcend itself. That’d be magic indeed.
A baser but still community-boosting impulse was the genesis for the Spreckels Organ Pavilion. John D. and Adolph B. Spreckels, the heirs of a sugar fortune, built it in the wake of the opening of the Panama Canal as part of a scheme to draw commercial interest to the city of San Diego. At one point its instrument was the biggest outdoor organ in the world, and while the pavilion’s fortunes have waxed and waned over the past century, it’s currently the site of weekly year-round free organ recitals and a special summer series of concerts sponsored by the San Diego Parks and Recreation Department. In 2017, a group of experimental composers wrote pieces for the Spreckels organ; four can be heard on the LP Organ For The Senses (Marginal Frequency), and while it doesn’t include Chantler’s contribution, you can get that from his Bandcamp page. You want immersive? Petition the return engagement and pack your bags for San Diego, where the force of the organ’s 5,017 pipes will turn your belly to jelly. Nothing you can fit into your computer can do that, but this ten-minute piece nicely sketches out the instrument’s potential. Chantler builds up ranks of sound, which part to reveal whorls of overtones and a sub-bass presence so solid you could herniate a disc just listening to it.
Front and Above approaches sound from another angle — instant music production. Chantler’s tenure at Café OTO put him in the room with London’s best improvisers, and this CD documents his first concert with two of them. Between them, saxophonist Seymour Wright and drummer Steve Noble have played with a formidable who’s who — Evan Parker, Eddie Prévost, Peter Brötzmann, John Butcher, Alan Wilkinson, etc. If you’re hearing him for the first time, Wright sounds like a successor of John Butcher; he’s alert, abrasive, able to change the temperature of a room with a single coarse note. Noble can fill the room with sound if he likes, but his playing is also highly detailed and endlessly variant. It’s handy to have a percussive thesaurus in the band with the third guy’s as likely to trigger a rain of mechanical pecking as he is to displace space with amorphous ghost tones. Sometimes Chantler is like a sound designer, influencing the atmosphere with subliminal presences, but he can respond timbre for timbre and gesture for gesture. This CD imparts an experience of constant unfolding, which makes sense given that it was the trio’s first encounter. Since then it has become an ongoing concern.
'Which Way to Leave?' is the latest record by Stockholm based musician John Chantler. The self-reflexive sequencing that tracks the sub-harmonic series in the opening blast of 'Falling Forward' positions the record as Chantler's most explicitly melodic. These melodies however do not exist in a mono-dimensional vacuum; rather they co-exist in a meshed framework of dynamic timbral layers. The record’s abrupt cuts, deft variations of density and unexpected diversions are happily explored with headlong dives into ravishing texture and extended stretches of surface stasis. The music draws on a domestic reimagining of the traditions of studio based electronic music/musique concrete and 20th century minimalism and delivers this with brash revitalised energy… We talk to John Chantler about having a freeform approach, collaboration and London architecture…
TSH: As you began work for the stellar ‘Which Way to Leave?’ did you anticipate a certain course or was it more of a freeform approach?
John: I’m glad you like the record. The approach is fairly freeform. Work on it until it comes together which is mostly a process of pairing things away until you end up with a big gap that you need to make something new for. Some things hung around for a while and others came together quite spontaneously at the end.
TSH: What can you tell us about your time spent in London forming music with an organ and modular synth…
John: For ‘Still Light, Outside’ I got access to the organ at St John at Hackney where I could go and play and record pretty much anytime over the period of a few months just before I left London. I did some work at EMS on the electronic parts just before I moved here and then spent much of my first winter in Stockholm working on the editing/mixing. This latest record was subject to the same mixing/editing process over the following winter. I like the onset of autumn for this — it brings a focus to being inside working.
TSH: You took your recordings to the famed Elektronmusikstudion EMS studios in Stockholm and processed them through wall sized modular synths, what was the level of focus like as you took on this task?
John: I have some similar stuff to EMS at home, but the environment there — from the studio arrangement to the killer monitoring — really helps in getting stuff done. ‘Which Way’ was probably done 2/3 at home and 1/3 at EMS — but I try to spend some time there for the mixing to make sure everything is right and to get another point of reference especially for the bass, which is always hard in a small apartment type room.
TSH: Do you feel the record has a clear sense of trajectory at times?
John: Yeah, I do. I hope it has clear sense of trajectory all the time. Of course, I’ve no expectation that that trajectory will be clear for everyone else and with any luck it can change each time you listen to it.
TSH: You had guest appearances by Carina Thorén and Okkyung Lee, how valuable was it to have their imprint on the music?
John: It was really great to have them involved. I’m a big fan of Okkyung’s music and she is great to hang out with. She has lots of good ideas and I just took a small bit from what she did in response to the music… Carina is the primary source for trying to make my music better. She is an incisive critic of what does and doesn’t work and she helps me to listen to what I’m doing in new ways. It can be pretty rough at times, but that kind of honesty is crucial. Her playing on the record came about almost by chance — she picked up the bass I’d been trying to record and just nailed a part I’d been trying to work into ‘First December’ — much more direct than anything I could have done.
TSH: What was the trickiest part in forming the title track?
John: This is based on a feedback/cross-modulation of a couple of slopes patched as sub-harmonic generators — no real sequencers or anything and at some point it hit on this kind of riff for several minutes. I edited this version down from that recording and added a couple of parts from the same session (re-recorded via some heavy-handed fader riding on the mixing desk). I like these kind of ‘accidents’ that come about from tweaking the same thing. The same kind of patch is also the basis for ‘Fixation Pulse’ as well (though done on the Serge at EMS). It has similar sounds / frequency relationships but there is a different outcome in the end.
TSH: Also, with a track like ‘All Visible Signs’ can you talk us through what your aims were…
John: This started out — as a number of things do — with trying to learn how to do something specific and then spun out from there — you hit a point where it feels like music and ceases to be about that initial learning thing and take it from there. In the end this piece is kind of about having something that just sounds the same all the time — a kind of non-repetitive repetition — but then has loads of stuff actually going on and hopefully a kind of rough physicality to it as well, even though it doesn’t have the physical impact of louder music.
TSH: Is your favourite piece of musical equipment still the Serge ’73 Filter?
John: I still like the filter very much — it’s what was used for almost all of ‘Beginning Again’ for example — being ‘pinged’ and resonating at the feedback threshold, but more and more I’m using the Serge Slope Generators as the starting point in a lot of my music right now — 40 years on and still an ingenious piece of electronics.
TSH: How much of what you do would you say is a constant task to make something memorable without being generic?
John: I think you want to try and make something that feels like it is yours but without pinning yourself down. Best way is generally not to think about and just go with those things that give you a rush of sorts.
TSH: You were a part of the First Edition Festival for Other Music in Stockholm this February. What was this like for you?
John: Yeah, this is a small festival that I organise. It was great. The music was exceptionally good — everyone really gave it their all — and lots of people came out for it which means I also get to do it again next February. It feels good to make something like this happen and to make a space for people to do their thing. Would be nice if I can keep it going for some time to come, but let’s see.
TSH: Also, what were the highlights of your recent UK tour?
John: The PA at Fort Process was pretty ridiculous for the room and my synths were behaving themselves. The power had cut out when I kicked in some bass during soundcheck so I spent most of the set trying to see if I could get it to cut out again but it held strong. Was a lot of fun trying though.
TSH: How poor was the architecture opposite the OTO venue in London?
John: It’s not good. But any place that is built for the accumulation of capital over creating a place for people to live in is going to fail architecturally as well as on so many other levels.
TSH: What do you admire mostly about Beaches & Canyons by Black Dice?
John: I love the utopian radiance of it — DIY means stretched into a grander form because all of that should be and is possible… It sounds wonderful, too — of course most things generally sound better through heavy tremolo!
TSH: Do you have strong views about the state of the UK’s politics in the wake of voting leave?
John: Yes, but I had strong views about it before then also. The problems remain the same, if perhaps the need to do something becomes more acute.
TSH: What TV and movies have you found most inspiring in recent times?
John: I don’t watch much TV. I watched the third series of The Bridge last year to practise my Swedish a bit. I’ve had more time to watch films since moving to Sweden — I just wish there were better options at the cinema instead of having to rely on streaming and such. I really enjoyed The Lobster. Lanthimos is making great films and it hasn’t been fucked up in the switch to English though Dogtooth is definitely a heavier punch to the gut.
TSH: Finally, what are you mostly observant to with your future musical endeavours?
John: I’m going to start work on another organ recording soon, so that is probably going to take up a bit of headspace over the winter alongside playing a bunch of shows and the ongoing process of trying to make those work — always an interesting challenge!
