BURKHARD STANGL + JOANNA JOHN

The collaboration between Stangl and Polish-born, Norway-based audio-visual artist Joanna John (she designed the artwork for his recent Zwölf album, as well as for Lynx) explores electroacoustic, textual soundscapes.
John plays the acoustic guitar in a very slow and quiet manner, and adds processed layers of Stangl’s deconstructed electric guitar that dissolves and echoes her own playing, subverting and contrasting her soft and warm tones with its intensity and dark spirit. This way of constructing the eight soundscapes is compared to an excursion into the wilderness, or an encounter with the eponymous lynx.

These intimate, dream-state soundscapes succeed to radiate simultaneously a strong emotional atmosphere and often even a tempting, sensual dimension but also a disturbing, threatening tone. You can feel it in the chilly “November Air” or “From The Distance” with their gentle waves of resonating acoustic guitar lines being washed away by a threatening, darker undercurrent. Later, “Taming a Deer” takes these complimenting courses and develops a surprising psychedelic texture. Only on “Her Presence And Tides” John and Stangl sound as courting and sparking each other in a delicate, somehow erotic dance. The dark undercurrent is intensified on the noisy drone of “Gravity” but the last “X” finds a peaceful common ground between the psychedelic tones of John and the suggestive guitar lines of Stangl.

For booking inquiries please contact: Joanna John / hello@kissthefrog.no

The collaboration between renowned composer Burkhard Stangl and audiovisual artist Joanna John explores the field of electroacoustics in an intriguing and engaging way. In these highly textural compositions, a carefully “deconstructed” guitar dissolves and echoes, deliberately and slowly, in quiet yet intense layers of electronic sound. References to nature in composition titles bring to mind a stark and awe-inspiring landscape, but this dark and uneasy edge emerges here as a source of fascination, like an excursion into the wilderness, or an encounter with the eponymous lynx.

– Olga Drenda, writer and journalist, „The Guardian”

Joanna travels from Tromso.
Burkhard travels from Vienna.