Jo Johnson Q&A Part Two today - in the studio and track breakdown

quiet details
5 days ago
4 min read

Hi friends - hope all good :)

Thanks so much again for all the support for Jo’s wonderful album - really has been so good to see all the adulation. I know this album means a lot to Jo and she put a huge amount of energy into it, so it’s awesome to know we all agree it’s a stunning piece of work.

The first part of our Q&A last week was a fascinating insight into Jo’s background and musical influences, this week we go deeper into her creative practice, the instruments she uses and the production behind Escape Now

Quick reminder that today is last day of half-price digital and CDs are still available. Message me if you bought the physical for the original long-form version of the album.

So here we go, huge thanks again to Jo!

Please can you give us an overview of your studio and favourite instruments?

I have a small room at the back of the building, overlooking our garden. There’s a large silver birch tree in next door’s back garden that fills the view from my window. It’s beautiful and it means that I’m always very aware of the seasons as it changes colour and level of light in the room throughout the year.

My cat, Spiegel, is almost always with me when I’m working and seems to enjoy it when I work on speakers. Emile has a room down the hall for his studio so we’re near each other but, very importantly, we each have a room of our own.

Instruments wise I rarely change things up, I like to learn the equipment I use so it becomes instinct. I’ve been using a Juno 106, Moog Mother 32 and Strymon Bluesky for years. To that I’ve added Warldorf Blofeld, Montreal Assembly Count to Five, OTO BIM delay, Empress Echosystem dual engine delay and the Moog MF Delay.

I’ve owned the mic, recorder, bells and harp I used on Escape Now for many years but always saved them for a special project. Sequencer wise I love the T-1 and used it for a couple of years now. It’s great for live performances.

This year I’ve been trying out the Midicake Arp and I love it, too. They both require different ways of thinking about sequencing and that makes for different work.

Please can you gives a quick breakdown of how you made each track?

With this album, I almost entirely immersed myself in the project for several weeks continuously and it was amazing. Something I used to long to do but couldn’t because of work and stuff. I think the album has a more consistent feel as a result, it’s one piece of work.

I wanted Escape Now to be different from the Alterations project, where each track is deliberately located in a specific month during 2025. I wanted it to be more timeless, off-world even. Hence the title.

I thought about escapism a lot while working on this album… We usually use the word to mean avoidance, removing yourself from something, from reality, but certain kinds of escapism can actually inspire activism and that interests me. Afrofuturism is a great example, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Virginia Woolf’s Orlando all escaped their contemporary setting to help us see things as they are and could be and provoked change in the real world.

You can gain clarity about the problems with the real world, imagine something worse or better, come back down to earth and use the energy and clarity gained to make change.

I improvised using my all hardware set-up – every day for a couple of weeks, at least. I have hours and hours of recordings. Then I listened through it all and selected the parts that I felt drawn to and slowly stitched those together as a single hour-long arrangement in Ableton – that is the long-form version.

That took another couple of weeks. I added live instruments and voice when I had the place to myself for a weekend (Emile had a gig in Galway) and it was very quiet here, and then I added wavetable synths and fx in the box. The track starts and endings came right at the end.