Thanks for a fantastic party! Jo Johnson Q&A Pt One today - musical background and philosophy

quiet details
6 days ago
8 min read

Hey friends - hope all good :)

Well what an awesome session that was! Absolutely packed full of friends, artists and music people from all over the place - all showing so much love and appreciation for Jo’s wonderful album - thank you to everyone that came!

As we touched on in the chat, it’s a strange world we live in but the community we have in our corner of the music world is just incredible and so life-affirming - every time we get together the shared sense of positivity and connectedness is so powerful.

So huge thanks to all of you for being there and sending so many good vibes Jo’s way - and also for all the support for the music! Escape Now is currently the best-selling CD on all of Bandcamp and fourth overall on any genre/format - amazing!

As always, if you bought the CD, message me if you want a private Bandcamp link to the long-form version - the album was originally made as a continuous piece so it’s the purest way to listen.

Now here’s Part One of our chat with Jo - huge thanks to her for the honest and in-depth answers, inspiring on so many levels x

Please tell us a bit about your background and history in music

Some people might already know that I had a brief experience of minor fame/infamy in the 90s as a member of Huggy Bear, part of the broader riot grrrl punk rock feminism and queer core movements. If people are interested, we published a book last year called Killed Of Kids with lots of our zines, photos and up to date interviews. There was also a piece about the book in the Guardian by Stevie Chick.

I started making music when I was 8 or something. My mum bought me a piano for £5 from a jumble sale and my uncle drove it home on the roof of his car, making a bit of a dent. Thanks, Uncle Mick! Then I learnt guitar and a little accordion, I got a semi-acoustic for my 16th. I was listening to punk, jazz, soul, blues, a little, classical, hip hop, pop and stuff from a pretty early age – had a group of precocious friends who swapped tapes all the time. Went dancing at Boiler House, Talkin’ Loud And Saying Something and Whirl-y-gig, Blow Up.

In the mid-late 90s, I got really into cosmic jazz (Alice Coltrane in particular), minimalism and electronic music (Bjork, jungle, Autechre, Drexciya, Aphex). I met my husband, Emile (Plant43), in 1998 – we crossed paths at drum and bass and electro events he organised – and we got together in 99. Pretty soon afterwards, we began buying gear and making electronic music together and solo.

In 2001 Emile co-founded Bleep43 with an old school friend (Toby Frith). I helped with the website first of all and pitched in on the first couple of events and then discovered I’d joined the crew. Around this time we were going to Lost together, Warp parties, we travelled to Paris to see Kraftwerk, Zurich to see Jeff Mills.

The Bleep43 events – first at Public Life in Shoreditch, then Corsica Studios in Elephant and Castle – were this great source of community and musical inspiration for both of us. We got to meet and see amazing people DJ and play live (Bea Brennan, Dan Bell, Donato Dozzy, Urban Tribe, Surgeon, Legowelt, Pole). And Emile and I both played our first live shows at Bleep43 events – Emile in 2002 and we played together as VLF the next year, I think.

I played solo house/techno/electro shows at Corsica a few times and that’s how Mark and Chloe from Further Records heard me. They invited me to make an album for the label after that. Originally that album was going to be on cassette, and that got me thinking about the kind of music I’d like to hear on a long, night drive. It brought back memories of an intense listening experience driving through the Arizona desert during a Huggy Bear tour, looking up at the stars. Those skies are mindblowing. And that’s what led to me writing the kind of music I did then and still make now, it was different to the music I’d made before yet something that made sense to people who knew my tastes. I think it had been brewing for a while, just waiting for the right opportunity.

Further put Weaving out on vinyl, in the end, but that transcendent, deep listening setting for my music making became somewhat of a fascination for me and enabled me to bring together influences from jazz, techno, early electronic music, film scores, minimalism, ambient, Japanese new age and experimental music. I’ve been lucky enough to be invited to release on some great labels that get what I do, Going In, Mysteries of the Deep, Castles in Space, Frequency Domain, Apartment and now quiet details!

Bleep43 started organising long, deep listening sessions in crazy venues from around 2015 with guests like Jonathan Fitoussi, Sarah Davachi, Anthony Child, Transcendence Orchestra, Polypores, Imaginary Softwoods, Loula Yorke, Bana Haffar, Hoch Ma Toch, Rrose... Just incredible people. Always so much to learn from our guests. We’re cooking up our next event at the moment. People can check out our website to find out a bit more - https://bio.site/bleep43 (Alex qd - next event looks amazing! Recommend signing up to their mailing list)

Please can you describe a bit about your general philosophy and process as an artist?

At the moment, I like to combine free improvisation with more deliberate composition in two steps. Improvisation is a meditative practice for me – an altered state – and it lets me tap into the subconscious and make less predictable, ego-driven music. I record a series of improvisations using the in-built recorder on my 1010 Bluebox mixer and then I compose by selecting, layering and arranging the recordings. It’s more like sculpting than painting, working out what’s there and how to bring out the interesting or moving aspects. I might add a field recording or VST part at this stage, or go back and record something to add to the improvised parts.

It’s a way of working that’s taken me a while to develop. I used to focus on the composition approach. Of course I’d start by noodling but I’d quickly pin things down to an arrangement, working with Ableton as my sequencer. I found that having complete control and infinite time to write from scratch led to excessive perfectionism and utter stasis. I can’t quite remember where it started but I distinctly remember chatting with Tony Child a long while ago about playing live, which led to an interesting conversation about improvisation. Reading Pauline Oliveros, hearing Charles Cohen talk about composing in real time, I became devoted to improvising and deep listening. I moved to an all-hardware set up as soon as my budget allowed and basically went in the extreme opposite direction for a while, only improvising from scratch. And that has moved me out of my perfectionism, which was really all to do with ego, if I’m honest.

Improvisation and deep listening practices are really vital for me as a musician and a person. Both change the way you think about yourself and the world around you. They’re humbling, truthful. Pauline Oliveros wasn’t just talking about listening deeply to music/other musicians in your group, she meant everything – the planet, those you consider your enemy. Deep listening came about as part of an anti-war movement and her words are more relevant than ever.

Improvisation challenges you to live intensely in the moment, with this incredible focus on now, and to accept who you are and what happens without judgement. If you make a mistake or encounter an issue with your gear when improvising you can’t go back in time and fix it. As it’s in real time you have to accept that whatever you intended didn’t happen and something new and unexpected has happened, and just listen. Then you can build from there, work with this surprising element. Sometimes those mistakes result in the best moments – and that means accepting that your intention/ego might not always be the best source of ideas. That’s why I say it’s humbling.

Hearing what’s interesting about unexpected sounds and events and working with them rather than resisting them is a good lesson for living life. Letting these events inspire the way the music develops. It’s an openness to the sounds in the room and the sounds outside the room. And that openness is important at a time of great division and othering.

I have three albums out that are recordings of real time improvisations – Let Go Your Fear, The Serpentine Path and Earlswood Common. I’ve tried improvising from scratch live, just an opening chord and arpeggio – no other sequences or anything to grab hold of – and it’s not something that I want to do at the moment. I need some structure, especially for longer live sets, so I have sequences and a kind of map for the whole set but there’s a lot of room for improvisation and randomisation within that so each set is fresh. I work without patches wherever possible so things will always sound slightly different and I’m finding that pretty fun. It’s a work in progress, though.

What does quiet details mean to you and how did you use that to approach this album?

First of all, I love so many quiet details releases and, as you know, I’m always recommending to friends that they work with you. It’s a great concept for a label and you put a lot into each release. And you’re really lovely to work with!

You invited me to release an album a long time ago so I’ve had time to think about it and see the label evolve. I was originally planning to write something so quiet it would barely be music at all but in the end that wasn’t entirely where the improvisations ended up. This is the thing with improvisation, it’s a bit like therapy and you may go in planning to talk about one thing but something completely unexpected ends up being the focus of the conversation. It’s just like that – what needs to come out, comes out.

I thought about the concept of solitude while I was making the album. The extremes of solitude, like the void of space, free but cold and maddening. And I think there’s a quiet absence in places. I’ve focused on tails – extending the edge of sounds with various fx. Pauline Oliveros said “Listen right out to the edge” and “It’s all in the listening, not in the playing.” So I’ve given sounds space and I’ve given a lot of attention to the non-musical sounds made playing live instruments, details like the brush of fingers on strings, a creak from Emile’s chair, my breath and non-verbal utterances. But I’ve also gone pretty wild with some parts and let it be chaotic or noisy or dramatic – which wasn’t so much my intention as just what felt right to make the music feel complete. There’s fullness and warmth as I thought about the sounds of new worlds, lush and bubbling with life.

Maybe I wanted some contrast to really emphasise the quieter moments, or I was just being a rebel haha...