die bewegung der augen for nine instruments [2012, rev. 2014]

with works by Georg Friedrich Haas and Jani Christou

“It’s true to say that a Musikfabrik concert can and often does involve a certain amount of acclimatisation, and it’s also true for ‘die bewegung der augen’ by Evan Johnson. As with all four works on this disc, it’s a piece exploring silence, or rather the fact that silence ‘is never empty’ (from Johnson’s programme note). Clearly the by-product of a lot more activity (in one form or another) than is audibly apparent, Johnson’s music here sounds private, not merely behind closed doors but positively internalised and miniaturised, as though we were privy to small-scale activities and actions that would otherwise be entirely oblivious to us. Its little bursts of material surrounded by silence gradually instigate a different mode of listening, one where I came to feel like the Incredible Shrinking Man, becoming smaller and smaller to the point that its tiny sounds and gestures yawned ever more impossibly above me. Beyond this, particularly in the second and third movements, a halting lyrical streak emerges that, in such a pint-sized context, sounds enormously poignant.”

— Simon Cummings, 5against4

“Silence in the sense of lack of sound is what we encounter in ‘die bewegung der augen’ by Evan Johnson. At the most unexpected moments, the music here stops, like an image that suddenly disappears when you close your eyes for a moment. It's a strange sensation. The music that Johnson has composed around the silences fits in beautifully with this, it has something coincidental, casual, in all its complexity almost sounding as if we were not meant to hear it.”

— Ben Taffijn, Nieuwe Noten

[ label | arkivmusic | musikfabrik ]