John H - No. 40, or, Accompaniments IV [253kbps]

Описание: 0:00 1. Riffs for Birdie
3:27 2. Gulag No. 40
6:05 3. The Inattentive Gambler Relieved of His Baubles
9:46 4. Bread No. 40
10:18 5. Loop No. 40
14:14 6. La loutre
17:32 7. Around Low Tide (2020)
22:05 8. Before Openness
23:58 9. Testing
24:43 10a. Session No. 40a: Fun Time
26:20 10b. Session No. 40b: Beatles
28:15 10c. Session No. 40c: Without Listening
30:03 11. Cuban Refugees Waiting for Rations (1898)
30:39 12. Premiers pas de bébé (1896)
31:17 13. About Face (1964)
35:13 14. Circulation of the Blood in the Frog’s Foot (1903)
42:19 15. Session No. 40e

"It is perhaps fitting that forty-- that esteemed numerological fetish integer-- arrives here in such an intentionally undramatic way. Yes, this is the fortieth. Apart from mentioning it, there's no fanfare or pageantry attached (after all, it's not number 50). For a period of about forty days the artist flirted with a title forty words in length. A twenty-word draft nested clauses inside clauses: 'Project Number Forty, or Applied Model Theory in Harmonic Modalities as Solution for a Desire of Patterns in Post-Music Futures'. A mouthful, and ultimately, the smaller glyph “No. 40” would suffice.

“40” referring to the preceding 39 things-- That is, forty counting back from his first musical endeavor, unsolicited refractions of tracks by Denton's own Beaver Machine. That 2008 project (the ur-impetus, that original sin) as Milton's paradise, remains regrettably lost, as does 2010's J.C., an EP of danceable beats. But let's not dwell. The artist compounds the meaning: Forty influences were brought to the album's approach. To name a few: Hæger’s Illustrated History of Surgery clots with Charles Eames’ lectures on modeling ideas; Malliart's bridges, Balthus's card-couplings, van der Leck's dockworkers namedropped as wielded aesthetic / archetypal implements. Color me intrigued, but I struggle to fully sense the connection between reference corpus and finished product (How does the architecture of Speer and Tadao Ando correlate to otter noises and frog heartbeats?) but the artist maintains the vectors exist.

On the second piece of the album's title, "or, Accompaniments IV": This is ostensibly the fourth in a series of film-accompaniment albums. Like his previous Tonbilder, the album's frame bows and bends uneasily to suit the artist's various musical compulsions, never fully settling into 'soundtrack' mode for than a few minutes at a time. In fact, the soundtrack pieces don’t begin until we’re close to the end of Side A ("or", indeed).

So what does it sound like? Well, It’s a grab-bag, similar to its sister-album. Some tracks recall Merzbeats, others utilize late Talk Talk's ‘studio-session-as-musico-probalizing-intstrument’ approach, and bits of ethereal sampling on the backend are reminiscent of the tapework of Mme. Derbyshire. It’s a distracted record. I think I say that positively.

John H cites “Beast Handgun” as the album's biggest influence. The group, formed in 2009 by the artist and two high-school chums 'told everyone [they] were the greatest band of all time'. "We never owned instruments, played together or recorded any songs, but we made an album cover. And we told people we were the greatest to ever do it. I'd like to think that [parts of No. 40] could be what Beast Handgun might've sounded like, if we'd actually made music... The song about trepanation, definitely." A conceptual band as prank theologeom, supremacist artistic status as a lark; A retroactive echo of a non-band, a Bayesian prior, subjective datum. Like film, the negative space casts a positive image. "It's probably not all that novel", the artist shrugs.

Maybe it isn't. Maybe it is (maybe it isn't). I sense multiple musical maybes within the album's over-40-minute runtime. Maybe what matters is that it’s the fortieth, and it behaves like a fortieth: Not culmination, not celebration, but a calibration mark, a ballasting. The artist further reinforced the non-milestone nature of the work throughout our forty minutes together, choosing instead to hype and praise his forthcoming “Open jazz” experiment.

“No. 40 is fine. It's fine. What I'd most like to discuss is open jazz”, which is, the artist maintains, the first “new” genre of music in 40 years. I can't comment on his newly-opened form of jazz. He only paid me for the promotion of this album."
Clint Harrigan, Retrospective

https://johnh.bandcamp.com/album/no-4...

NF1022 - Release date November 18th, 2025