Much of the sounds come from being truthful and being honest with yourself. It can take you to a whole new world to see where the opened world will take you. For Sverre Knut Johansen, he’s carried that vibe with his latest release on the Spotted Peccary label entitled Still Time. It has a lot of the musical structures that come into play.
Johansen would take his listeners deep into the heart of the jungle with visual scenery’s coming to life. Most of the time it’s dangerous, and most of the time it puts you in a place filled with empathy and sorrow. But what Johansen does on Still Time is to tackle the themes on animal extinctions that have been affected by climate change.
It’s a combining piece that blends in spacious arrangements, human vocalizations, and the danger that is upon the horizon. Some of the centerpieces on this album include a shrieking sound of the strings with a Stravinsky and Hans Werner Henze momentum that comes into play. It has this tribal force which speak of the ‘Rite of Spring’ and ‘Fantasia for Strings’ rolled into one on ‘The Desert Elephants of Namibia’.
You have blaring trumpets going into a full roaring mode, dramatic percussion work, and the elephants torturing the cities, one by one until they leave at the crack of dawn. ‘Massive Extinction’ is almost a post-apocalyptic composition. The mournful arrangements Johansen creates is almost like looking through the destruction after the riots had occurred.
You feel as if you’re right in the middle of a war that’s going on during the pandemic. I felt some tugs behind Anathema’s We’re Here Because We’re Here, Gazpacho, and Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here-era that comes to mind while the gentle sounds of an acoustic guitar which speaks of Kevin Kastning’s textures comes into play, ‘Rhinoceros on Large Salt Pan’ walks into a flamenco bossa-nova restaurant as the effects make you feel that you’re in the heart of the forest in South Africa, taking pictures of the endangered species whilst being in awe of what they do for a living.
‘Oryx in Yellow Light’ puts you right in the middle of a heavy thunderstorm in the heart of the ocean with the gods crashing the waves, seagulls cawing in the middle of the night, and the sounds of a wider-range coming towards dry land, is a mesmerising form of beauty before closing it out with ‘Cheetah’s Realm (At the Masai Mara National Reserve)’ with poly-rhythmic drums, eerie piano work, unexpected CAN-like themes, and driving off into the night, knowing that the journey is far from over.
Still Time may not be for the faint of heart, but what Johansen has done is to capture the sounds of the natural world in all of its tricky momentum. But he pushes it right in front of you by saying “Look in here, this is what’s going on, and this is what we need to do. We may not agree with this, but we have to do something to prevent it from happening”.
And the experience itself is quite the adventure, we’ve embarked on.
