Evan Johnson

TL;DR: Evan Johnson's music is highly structured and melodic, with beautiful vocal writing and compelling motivic signatures. The music is unique and beguiling, and the performances are entirely convincing.

Abstract: even when nominally they have a high number. Notes are elaborations of a bespoke tuning system for the melody in question. Notes are entities already embedded within a motivic and therefore rhythmic framework. A note has gestural modes of being, as well as access and egress. This is music that sounds vaguely familiar, sounds like the field recordings of folk musics far from the influence of the Western music industry. But it is totally unique and beguiling, totally itself. Each of these pieces has a personality, and I found myself imagining that each had a kind of recognisable pen stroke. The album artwork by Hyun Yoon loosely takes on this idea: visual forms are created from repeated physical motions of the pen or brush on paper. Each melody has a compelling motivic signature which emphasises a timbral signature of the instrument(s), the harmonic signature of the intonation regime, and the rhythmic and metric patterning. The vocal writing is especially beautiful. Denyer himself is the vocalist in the fifth and eighth movements, both for solo voice. That there should be so much vocal writing is no surprise given the importance of personhood and personality in this music. Each piece is a highly structured gem, as the composer details at length in the liner notes. Yet a stylistic continuity is impossible to miss; as I listened, I often had to check if a silence was part of the same movement or the boundary between two. If one is to let go of focused listening and allow the mind to wander, one can easily get lost in the labyrinthine structures. For limited spans it is a wonderful experience, but one that needs to come to an end before all 25 pieces have been heard. Returning to the album and starting at various points or shuffling the tracks randomly is an immensely enjoyable experience – like wandering through the streets of an unfamiliar city. The span from the eighth to thirteenth movements is especially enchanting. The performances across the board are entirely convincing as to the intent of the music and the composer. The only issue in an otherwise pristine release are the occasional fade to -inf at edit points. In all likelihood, two different takes were cut together and the best juncture was found. But in such an organic musical situation, this highly artificial artefact is jarring.