#Audiorama Stockholm

[nosrac]

Live at Algorave, Stockholm, Audiorama, 170329

[dustedmagazine]

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.  

Bill Meyer