A flying visit to the lovely O’ in Milan, Italy, proved the ideal occasion to chat to John Chantler about his live set-up and the forthcoming album Still Light, Outside, out in August 2015.
Originally from Australia John Chantler now lives in Stockholm, Sweden. He released his third solo LP for Lawrence English’s ROOM40 label in 2014 – ‘Even Clean Hands Damage the Work’ recorded for the most part at EMS studios in Stockholm. The album followed on from ‘The Luminous Ground’ – released in 2011 and included in The WIRE magazine’s top releases of that year. ‘The Luminous Ground’ was his first LP release focusing on the modular synthesizer system he first explored as part of the trio LP with Lawrence English and Tujiko Noriko – 2009’s ‘U’.
Live, he patches a versatile system capable of self-generated, shifting patterns of sliding arpeggios and visceral noise, pointillist interjections and infinitely variable textures.
Initiated in 2011 with a private edition LP, Chantler’s ‘Automatic Music’ series resumed in 2014 with a second volume on cassette via The Tapeworm and volume three coming as a 40 minute digital download of ‘Automatic Music for Henry Flynt’.