Name: Rush (Looking Glass II) by JAY-JAY JOHANSON
Duration: 2 min 52 s
Description: After the success of the Looking Glass album, released as the bonus disc of Spellbound 8 years ago, here comes more acoustic versions of songs taken from the earlier records of Jay-Jay Johanson. Recorded live on October 7th 2016 in Jay-Jay's living room.

Iiro Rantala String Trio - Karma

Jun Miyake The Here and After

Composer : Airelle Besson
Live at Jazzfest Munster 2015

Besson/Sternal/Burgwinkel Trio - 'The Painter And The Boxer' (A. Besson) - Live

Manta Ray By J. Ralph & Antony (Original Song From Racing Extinction SNDTRK) AUDIO

Out on Morr Music 2016-11-11
With his latest record, Notwist singer & guitar player, film soundtracker and label boss Markus Acher, aka Rayon, offers up a sparse, intoxicating LP of instrumentals.
As the name suggests, the spaces between notes here are treated with as much gravity as the notes themselves – arpeggios spiralling upwards, conflicting yet interlocking in a dizzying overlap of time signatures.
An obvious reference point is Javanese gamelan, with its ensemble of hand-beaten metallophones and bamboo flutes, pulling in all directions at once and yet, like a starling murmuration, maintaining shape as one, rippling whole.
Eschewing electronic equipment, the title track sees marimbaphone, piano and vibraphone appearing to mimic a delay pedal, giving the effect of rain falling with odd regiment into a singing bowl.
This melancholy but weirdly uplifting arrangement surfaces throughout the record, punctuated by mossy synth hums and subterranean rustling. Like much of Rayon’s work, “A Beat of Silence” beams across like a soundtrack for some forgotten documentary: dusty archive footage of cities being built and eroded in time-lapse seeming to flicker across the screen.

Closing tracks “To the Quiet”, a tentative, almost impossibly fragile ballad, and “Kona”, a stretched and mangled wash of orchestral drone akin to Plinth or Edmund Finnis, leave the listener fully enveloped, as this incredibly sensitive work draws to a close.

Richard Greenan (Kit Records, Devon Loch)

A Beat of Silence

Buy The Single

Rayon: Dots

After the success of the Looking Glass album, released as the bonus disc of Spellbound 8 years ago, here comes more acoustic versions of songs taken from the earlier records of Jay-Jay Johanson. Recorded live on October 7th 2016 in Jay-Jay's living room.

Rush (Looking Glass II)

PJ Harvey & Harry Escott - An Acre Of Land


Two countries, two cities, one river. The Oder River not only separates the German city of Frankfurt from Slubice in Poland, it separates two different worlds from each other. Whether rich or poor, people try to seek their fortune there – but often only find their limits.

Hans-Christian-Schmid („Nach fünf im Urwald“, „23“, Crazy“), one of the most successful and exciting young German directors, made a moving film with an impressive ensemble, telling emotional, deeply human stories, subtle and moving, tough and yet full of poetry.

Notwist composed the music for this film, based on a pianoloop and minimal electronics, and recorded it with participation of Sebastian Hess (cello) and Saam Schlamminger (zarb). For the twelve-inch release the piece was remixed by Martin Gretschmann aka Console.





Alien Transistor shop

The Notwist - Lichter 1

Nik Bärtsch's Ronin – Modul 27

Mysteries of Love- Antony and the Johnsons- I Fell In Love With A Dead Boy

Part of the Radialnacht concert with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra @ Radialsystem,
May 3rd 2013

Arvo Pärt - Fratres (Remix)

was in 1996 that Jay-Jay Johanson, a young man from a cold climate, fascinated by the Bristol sound they called trip-hop and Portishead in particular, first tapped delicately on our eardrums.
The intoxicating album that definitively put this rare and elegant Swede on the map was called Whiskey. It was the beginning of an enthralling adventure. In only a few songs he revealed a family tree that spread its roots far and wide: on one branch Lee Hazlewood, or pop from Talk Talk or Nilsson, on the other John Coltrane with Johnny Hartman, and a whole army of calm jazz or symphonic
recordings sampled from everywhere imaginable.
Almost 20 years later he has returned with an
incredible new album. This new release is called Opium and it contains the very essence of Johanson’s music: an ease with inventing melodies, a voice that gently caresses, and the jacked up, heady rhythms that lift and carry the songs. From the peaceful harmonica opening of Drowsy / Too Young To Say Good Night to the smoke-wreathed love song I Don’t Know Much About Loving, via titles with a sporadic and light groove (NDE, Alone Too Long), Opium is a courageous offering. Johanson opens his heart with
fearlessness and modesty, gracefully lowering his guard and evoking the questions that torment men of his age: love, solitude, immaturity. The songwriting is unerring, the words have a suppressed poetry. This
new Johanson is the work of a guy who has survived the avalanches, who is no longer looking for answers and is content to sketch out the perspectives in as many songs. Some titles are serious (Harakiri), but others immediately take up the reins casting a more
gentle, peaceful light, like Scarecrow, a collaboration with Robin Guthrie that would not have sounded out of place on a Cocteau Twins album, or of the strange positivity of Be Yourself or I Love Him So.
The strength of Opium is that it asks questions that don’t necessarily have an answer; it offers a collection of songs freed from any certitude but which convince
through their modesty, through their precision.
In short, Jay-Jay at his best.

Rush (Looking Glass II)

JAY-JAY JOHANSON

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