John Also Bennett - Music for Save Rooms 1 & 2

“Mind-nourishing and atmospherically luxe, 'Music For Save Rooms 1 & 2' is a fine example of how video game music can cross brazenly into the avant-garde.” - Boomkat

John Also Bennett (JAB)’s Music for Save Rooms 1 & 2 compiles two volumes of minimalist music “meant to color the atmosphere of a room in which you can stay a while, but that you will have to leave in the end”. Recorded across five years, the music was initially conceived as a set of infinitely looping and morphing compositions for conceptual “save rooms”, temporary safe spaces within video game maps. Music for Save Rooms 1, released digitally in 2020, has been definitively mixed and expanded, and is presented here alongside Music for Save Rooms 2, a second album of music stemming from the same original sessions. Save Rooms 2 differs from its predecessor - instead of a collection of disparate works centered around a theme, the album presents a narrative, a tour through the mind’s eye of an artist searching for an elusive place, somewhere in the open world of our collective consciousness. Mastered by Stephan Mathieu.

Christina Vantzou, Michael Harrison and John Also Bennett - Live in Lanzarote

Filmed at the 18th edition of the Festival de Música Visual de Lanzarote. Video projections by Ildefonso Aguilar.

CV & JAB - Κλίμα (Klima)

Out September 29th on Editions Basilic

Bandcamp / Spotify / Apple Music / Boomkat

Κλίμα (Klima) is the third album by CV & JAB, the duo of Christina Vantzou and John Also Bennett. An assertive step forward in the two artists' investigations into melodic interplay, acoustic processing and field recordings, the full-length conjures the modus operandi of archaeologists searching for unheard soundscapes. Structured as an itinerant mise-en-abyme, Κλίμα (Klima) summons worldwide submarine circuits and tropospheres populated by sudden findings and progressive re-encounters - hazy dreams amalgamate with mosaics of reality. 

Catalyzed by a 2021 invitation to perform at the UNESCO world heritage site Santuário Bom do Jesus do Monte in Braga, Portugal, the music of Κλίμα (Klima) then fermented across a period of two years, during which live experiments, cyclical studio sessions, and travels across the Island of Tenerife’s effervescent ambiences gradually contributed to its completion. It is on the volcanic island that the narrative core of the album materialized, prompted by a month of recordings across the radically different microclimates populating the landscape. CV & JAB’s flashing transpositions from desert to rainforest are evoked over ten tracks operating as an abstract audio-guide of the outer and inner realms permeating the pieces. 

Κλίμα (Klima) is conceived as a rhizomatic composition rather than a sequential excursus; percussion, refracted voices, chirps and gurgles, other-worldly synthetic winks, reverberated piano chords, and yearning flute circumnavigations all surface sometimes in solo, sometimes synchronically to eventually dissipate again. The remote and enigmatic atmospheres that characterized previous CV & JAB albums acquire an intimate intensity in the solo piano excursions - “Klima” and “Lands of Permanent Mist” - and a penetrating emotional resonance with the instrument’s flirtatious entanglements with JAB’s bass flute on “Dwelling” and “Pottery Fragments” or with CV’s flickering plasma voice in “Jetstream”. 

Suggesting timeless wanderings in ambient études and classical minimalism, the album deploys as a mirage, inducing listeners into a contemplative state through mellifluous repetitions and offshore sci-fi inflections. The palpable depth of the recordings bestows each track with a distinctive density and presence: sounds and chords materialize and dematerialise as landscapes at which we gaze, half-asleep over a long journey. Ten sips of a familiar rapture which ooze a renewed sense of expansion in sound, informed by more than five years of CV & JAB’s continuous sonic wanderings and wonderings together.

The labyrinthine and meteorological odyssey becomes tangible in the artwork, realized by the duo’s long-time collaborator Zin Taylor, mind and hand behind their two previous albums’ covers. Κλίμα (Klima)’s simulacra evokes a map in which curves transform into a score with “small systems of differences emerging side by side”. CV & JAB’s Κλίμα (Klima) is out on September 29th, 2023 in limited edition LP and digital formats from Editions Basilic, with an exclusive turquoise vinyl variant available from Boomkat.