John Chantler - Which Way To Leave? LP

Label: Room40

Our Review:

A continuing presence on the esteemed Room40 label, John Chantler is an Australian electronic musician whose globetrotted his way to Tokyo, London, and now Sweden, where he's ventured on more than one occasion into Stockholm's historic EMS. The extended layover in Stockholm may very well be by design as his work has now come to embrace the spartan, ice-floe poetics of Rune Lindblad or Gunner Moller Pedersen (NB, this latter reference is a Danish composer, but there's a lot of very lovely similarities between Chantler and Pedersen). Rhythm had played a considerable part of Chantler's earliest work both on Room40 and in his work drumming for the Tenniscoats, but those steady pulses have dissolved within his de-centered abstractions of modular synth patchings. His burbling, overlapping investigations through the folds and rhizomes of his electronic pixel bloom and spiralling filigree will form as similarly atomic constellations that Eduard Artemiev would coax from the ANS synthesizer. Yet at other times, Chantler would coax that humanizing grit of pink noise which Fennesz extracted from his guitar on his first fruits for Mego.