Eremo: by Jeff Johnson and John Van Deusen

Jeff Johnson and John Van Deusen  

Album: Eremo  Release: 2/2024
Genre: Ambient “New Age” in the loose tradition of Philip Glass

Quick spin:
Veteran Celtic-Cinematic key-man Jeff Johnson has teamed with post-punk, neofolk troubadour and keyman John Van Deusen to create a 29 minute “audio-visual” dive into hallowed space, and wide-awake lucid dreaming.

Based on the title (Eremo, Italian for Refuge or Hermitage) and a thought-shaping video by Johnson, I start my audio-visual trek in a forest grotto. I am in a mossy enclave, surrounded by living things. Second listen, I loosen up, visualizing swelling copper-lime seas at sunset. Now I am on to manta rays gliding through Aurora Borealis.

Bridge:
I have walked with Jeff Johnson through numerous collaborations. As a rule, it is easy to tell who is Jeff, and who is non-Jeff. Jeff plays keys, others play violin or flute, guitar. sax, or voice. But now that we have another key man, how do we tell the two apart?

First listen, I am hearing hallmark Jeff… then I hear a most peculiar sound. Jeff has always layered his work, but this subterranean sound is more like scraping paper--Like noise. Then I remember a song by John (because I love John too) that collapses into pure noise.

My guess -- John is responsible for not only peculiar textural elements, but a greater push into audio oddness, like those thudding threshold sounds that make my ears feel like I am driving with one window down.

(Am I right?)

Long Play
When I was a kid, our seventh grade Music teacher introduced us to audio “Mimesis” --- the concept of music imitating or suggesting real world sounds. These sounds might include birdsong, animal cries, trains, explosions, footsteps—anything that makes noise.

And so it is that I came to hear Flight of the Bumblebee, the Grand Canyon Suite (with its donkey clops, wind generators, and thundering cymbals) or the gently rising sun of Morning Mood from the Peer Gynt Suite. (I don't know, does the rising sun have a sound?)





For people less familiar with ambient music, Eremo may stretch their very definition of what music is. How do we speak of a composition that is lean of note, chord and beat --- built on swaths of prismatic sound? Or ---how do we speak of a sound that seems to be like many sounds at once, ever changing.


Eremo is not without grounding elements. Johnson and Van Deusen employ sporadic piano and organ, together with birds, bells, and chimes--heartbeats, buzzers, rustling leaves, garbled tape, seeping water, bubbling pots, green noise, and plenty of space.

Forgive me in that I do not know the right word, but I figure that if 4/4 time signals a brisk steady pace, then Eremo must be built on something akin to 9/10 time. (Is there such a thing?) The entire composition pulses to the rhythm of a long breath. I can literally keep time, breathing in and out…slowly, like I do for the doctor, or when sampling the fragrance of a primal forest.





Inasmuch as both Johnson and Van Deusen are students of God the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, I should not be surprised if they intend Eremo to be suggestive of spiritual realities. But how does an instrumentalist suggest the realm of spirit in sound? Is it the sound of wind or silence or implied light? All I know is that when I listen to this music I come away with a sense of Divine Cohabitation.

God is near. Present. In the mix.

Which does sound peculiar. But I figure: I am in the world. The world (to some extent) is in me. The world is in God (in whom we live and move and have our being.) Indeed God not only holds the Cosmos in his hand, He sustains it, working in and through it.

All of which may sound perfectly lovely---with a twist.

When unleashed by Eremo, I envision not only beautiful things like welling seas and fanning light, I also imagine weird and creepy things, like paramecia and slime mold, jittering atoms, oily light and descending fog. But if God owns the cattle on a thousand hills, he owns too, the centipedes beneath a thousand rocks.  By the time I get to Stage Seven (the final movement) I envision killer whales and angels streaming overhead across a canopy of stars.


Final Note
I hope this doesn't deflate Jeff or John but I have found a new use for Eremo. I can listen to Eremo with headphones, enthralled--turning each layer of sound on my ears... OR, I can play the thing on my low-fi phone by my bed at night - and be knocked out by the second movement.




And so it goes, the sounds of Eremo have become my inner track, by day and night.



Eremo on Jeff Johnson's BandCamp with added links to video

and for marvels from Van Deusen, click HEAR:)