A Few We Remember is the debut album by American baritone sax player-composer Jonah Parzen-Johnson and Finnish sound artist-producer-composer Lau Nau (aka Laura Naukkarinen), offering eight mysterious, suggestive, cinematic, and story-like improvisations of knotty, ambient music. The album was recorded on the island in southwest Finland, where Lau Nau lives, where both Parzen-Johnson and Lau Nau enjoyed lots of hot smoked salmon and brisk island walks.
Parzen-Johnson sets the melody and the fragile emotional core of each piece, all correspond with the suggestive titles, while Lau Nau enriches each piece with colorful, delicate, and nuanced layers of vintage electronics, live-sampling, processed, and re-synthesized sounds, often in a dream-like state, offering resistance or subversive tones.
The album was recorded live, with no overdubs, an approach that intensified its fresh, peaceful, and friendly story-like conversations-encounters-improvisations. All eight pieces are first takes, relying on Parzen-Johnson’s loose story outlines. The interplay of Parzen-Johnson and Lau Nau is natural, allowing the music to flow in its own accord. Often, both Parzen-Johnson and Lau Nau sound as creating a unified, ethereal sonic unity.
Eyal Hareuveni
Jonah Parzen-Johnson (baritone saxophone), Lau Nau (electronics, sampling, processing)
