The sophomore solo bass album of Swedish, Stockholm-based Johannes Burström offers another unique experience for the aficionados of the low-end frequencies. Burström deepens his ongoing sonic research with a long-form dialog between the double bass and homebrew feedback setup, and between generative processes and improvisation. He attempts to stretch the physical and aural boundaries of the bass, now shaped by the turbulences from a string-filtered feedback loop.

«Dyad» was recorded on a damp but clear winter’s day in the archipelago outside of Stockholm in January 2019. The sounds from the double bass were processed with a custom software patch and sent back to a couple of transducer speakers mounted on the bass. The feedback affects the sustain and other physical characteristics of the instrument. Later on, this 37-minutes piece was cut and extended vertically with echoes from additional microphones, chords, and field-recorded bridges.

This methodical experiment enables intrepid listeners to investigate the microtonal aspects, characteristics, and colors of every resonating sound and its accumulative effect. The dark, earthy, and wooden sounds blend and disperse within unworldly, weird and noisy sounds and create a new, futurist sonic entity. The outcome is very quiet, minimalist, and monotonous but still arresting, as the debut solo bass album, «Timmer» (BoogiePost Recordings, 2018), was. «Dyad» goes even deeper in its endless trial to stop the sense time and lock it into a reverberating sound capsule of the processed bass.

Eyal Hareuveni

Johannes Burström (b, elec, mix)