editions basilic

CV & JAB is a duo consisting of John Also Bennett (JAB), a Brooklyn-based sound designer who is also a member of RVNG, and Christina Vantzou, a composer based in Brussels, Belgium. & JAB", a duo from Kranky, consisting of JAB (aka Bennett) and Christina Vantzou, a composer based in Brussels, Belgium, released a popular album on their own label "Editions Basilic" in 2020, which has been reissued on vinyl! The artwork for this album was created by Zin Taylor, a Canadian artist living in Paris who is known for his elaborate installations that incorporate elements of performance and sculpture. Their previous work was an attempt at a musical interpretation of a 90-meter-long panoramic mural created by the same artist. The beauty of the work is similar to that of Japanese environmental music by Hiroshi Yoshimura, Yutaka Hirose, and Satoshi Ashikawa, but this is a more melancholic and introspective view of the world. This is a great masterpiece of modern classical ambient, with enigmatic piano investigations spreading endlessly, interweaving naturalistic field recording materials and electronics in a dotted pattern. Mastered by Stephan Mathieu and cut in analog by Dubplates & Mastering. Limited edition 357 copies.

Κλίμα (Klima) is the third album by CV & JAB, the duo of Christina Vantzou and John Also Bennett. An assertive step forward in the two artists' investigations into melodic interplay, acoustic processing and field recordings, the full-length conjures the modus operandi of archaeologists searching for unheard soundscapes. Structured as an itinerant mise-en-abyme, Κλίμα (Klima) summons worldwide submarine circuits and tropospheres populated by sudden findings and progressive re-encounters - hazy dreams amalgamate with mosaics of reality. Catalyzed by a 2021 invitation to perform at the UNESCO world heritage site Santuário Bom do Jesus do Monte in Braga, Portugal, the music of Κλίμα (Klima) then fermented across a period of two years, during which live experiments, cyclical studio sessions, and travels across the Island of Tenerife’s effervescent ambiences gradually contributed to its completion. It is on the volcanic island that the narrative core of the album materialized, prompted by a month of recordings across the radically different microclimates populating the landscape. CV & JAB’s flashing transpositions from desert to rainforest are evoked over ten tracks operating as an abstract audio-guide of the outer and inner realms permeating the pieces. Κλίμα (Klima) is conceived as a rhizomatic composition rather than a sequential excursus; percussion, refracted voices, chirps and gurgles, other-worldly synthetic winks, reverberated piano chords, and yearning flute circumnavigations all surface sometimes in solo, sometimes synchronically to eventually dissipate again. The remote and enigmatic atmospheres that characterized previous CV & JAB albums acquire an intimate intensity in the solo piano excursions - “Klima” and “Lands of Permanent Mist” - and a penetrating emotional resonance with the instrument’s flirtatious entanglements with JAB’s bass flute on “Dwelling” and “Pottery Fragments” or with CV’s flickering plasma voice in “Jetstream”. Suggesting timeless wanderings in ambient études and classical minimalism, the album deploys as a mirage, inducing listeners into a contemplative state through mellifluous repetitions and offshore sci-fi inflections. The palpable depth of the recordings bestows each track with a distinctive density and presence: sounds and chords materialize and dematerialise as landscapes at which we gaze, half-asleep over a long journey. Ten sips of a familiar rapture which ooze a renewed sense of expansion in sound, informed by more than five years of CV & JAB’s continuous sonic wanderings and wonderings together. The labyrinthine and meteorological odyssey becomes tangible in the artwork, realized by the duo’s long-time collaborator Zin Taylor, mind and hand behind their two previous albums’ covers. Κλίμα (Klima)’s simulacra evokes a map in which curves transform into a score with “small systems of differences emerging side by side”. - Vittoria de Franchis, July 2023

Tidal Perspectives is an album by Giovanni Di Domenico, Pak Yan Lau, and John Also Bennett. Recorded across a single afternoon in Brussels, Belgium, the album’s four parts are a rippling alchemy of processed Rhodes piano, sizzling ceramics, and liquified bass flute, a rare meeting of three unique voices from the contemporary music landscape that manages to flow with the effortless inevitability of the oceanic tides. Giovanni Di Domenico, an accomplished composer and prolific collaborator who has released albums with Jim O’Rourke, Eiko Ishibashi and Akira Sakata, among many others, initiated the collaboration with Bennett after the two met at a record fair in Saint-Gilles, Belgium and bonded over a shared inquisitiveness for unconventional sonic combinations. Along with Pak Yan Lau, a Belgian-born sound artist and improviser who has developed her own rich and unique sonic footprint, the trio entered the studio with little, if any, discussion beforehand, jumping right into playing without preconceived structures. The resulting recordings had a depth of sound and emotional resonance surprising even them, with finished pieces emerging from single live takes and minor edits. Bennett, known for his solo work as well as his collaborations with Christina Vantzou as CV & JAB, gives us here a taste of his bass flute in free flowing form. Unconstricted by concept, joyfully and lazily bouncing off the melodic shimmers of Di Domenico’s Rhodes, Bennett uses his flute’s pitch information to trigger long tones that emerge like rays of light piercing through low hanging clouds - moments of clarity among a clicking world of sonic stimuli. Meanwhile, Lau’s crackling and sometimes dissonant contributions on prepared piano, live hydrophone, and custom ceramic sound objects balance out the triangle, adding a sense of microcosmic intrigue that allows the music to seamlessly ebb and flow between moments of comfort and foggy uncertainty. The album’s title track and climax, the eighteen minute “Tidal Perspectives”, drifts in with some kind of clarity, Lau’s glinting tonal waves edging in just beyond the horizon lines drawn by Di Domenico’s Rhodes and Bennett’s bass flute. But like the tidal flows of the Atlantic that inspired its title, just as you begin to perceive what’s happening, the currents have already taken you out to sea.