Chuck Johnson

The Cinder Grove

by Chuck Johnson

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Charlie Moonbeam Chuck Johnson's musical evolution is like a slow and endless drive through the diverse and magnificent landscapes of the Americas... always calming, always gorgeous.

Robert van Riel 5 feb 2021

Ian 2nd best news of 2020

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Deluxe LP housed in old style tip-on jacket with UV spot finishes.

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	1.	Raz-de-Marée 08:12
	2.	Serotiny 07:17
	3.	Constellation 06:48
	4.	Red Branch Bell 10:44
	5.	The Laurel 09:26

about

The follow-up to Johnson’s acclaimed Balsams LP, The Cinder Grove delves further into the compositional possibilities of the pedal steel guitar. This halcyon collection of tracks draws on a wider pallette of sounds, adding strings and piano, to dive deeper into the sound bath of Johnson’s meditative music.

The Cinder Grove is a profound, affecting statement on the nature of loss and irreplaceability as well as a major addition to the canon of Johnson’s work. It's a suite of requiems for lost places. Many of the spaces that once fostered affordable living and creative work now only exist in sonic memory, like the echoes of ghosts. Like much of the California landscape in recent years, some of these spaces having succumbed to fire. Others, to the equally inexorable forces of gentrification. While his 2017 LP Balsams was intended to provide the listener with a space for respite and calm—even healing—The Cinder Grove seeks to remember what has been lost while celebrating the resilience of the human spirit and the natural world.

In making The Cinder Grove, Johnson dug through archival recordings from Oakland DIY performance spaces to digitally extract their reverb and echo qualities. He then applied these effects—as well as the digitally modeled reverberation of a redwood forest—to the tracks on The Cinder Grove, allowing the pieces to bask in the lush virtual spaces, and in the process realized that these sonic re-constructions can only ever be approximations. We try to make spaces what we want them to be, whether in memory or in the material present.

credits

released February 5, 2021

All music composed by Chuck Johnson and published by Sruti Music (ASCAP)

Recorded and mixed by Chuck Johnson at Cirrus Oxide in Oakland, California
String ensemble conducted by Jason Hoopes and recorded by The Norman Conquest at Expression in Emeryville, California
Piano recorded by Sarah Davachi in Los Angeles, California
Mastered by Bo Kondren at Calyx Mastering in Berlin, Germany

Front cover “Geschenk der Seherin” by Johannes Schebler

Layout and design by Rob Carmichael, SEEN

Chuck Johnson | pedal steel guitar, synthesizers, Yamaha electronic organ, treatments
with:
Sarah Davachi | piano
Marielle V. Jakobsons | violin
Hilary Lewis | violin and viola
Crystal Pascucci | cello

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Chuck Johnson Oakland, California

N/S America bookings + licensing/commission inquiries - forest@asragency.com

Recordings available from Thrill Jockey, VDSQ, Three Lobed, Kompakt, Trouble in Mind, and Scissor Tail Editions, among others.

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