Over the last decade, Australian born, Sweden based artist, John Chantler, has emerged as a notable force in the worlds of electronic experimentalism and modular synthesis, relentlessly refining his pursuit of sonic unknowns through a series of carefully crafted solo releases, as well as within collaborations with some of the most notable acoustic instrumentalists from across the globe. Back in 2019 we were blown away by his LP, Tomorrow is Too Late, comprised of works for synth and organ, commissioned by INA GRM and issued by Room40. Now he returns with two incredible collaborative LPs - Atlantis, made as a trio with stalwart improvisers from the British scene, Steve Noble, & Seymour Wright, and Andersabo, a duo with Danish saxophonist, Johannes Lund. Both represent some of the most exciting territories of experimentalism and improvisation we’ve heard this year.

Building on the ground gained by 2017’s Front And Above, Atlantis is the second outing from the trio of synthesist John Chantler, saxophonist Seymour Wright and drummer Steve Noble. Cut and mixed on a single day in Stockholm, it encounters the group in the throes of a deep, highly individualised, state of real-time improvisation - moments born of the forceful interplay between Chantler’s unexpected deployment of synth, against the tone and rhythms of two of England’s most distinctive, active, and turbulent figures in spontaneous music. Across the album’s two sides, it becomes rapidly clear that the trio’s work together over the years has borne fruit, with their rigour and level of communication steadily expanding into a language entirely their own.

As is most often the case with great moments of improvisation, Atlantis is a conversation; the product of careful responses and interjections of each personality in play. Within this outing, against the voices of each player is the equally present force of the studio in which the album was recorded. Discovering that it radically altered the trio’s sound with reverb-soaked ambience, Chantler and Wright took advantage of a pair of matching Fender tube amps, charging their individual signals to match the booming, resonant sprawl of Noble’s pinpoint clatter. The result is incredible, Chantler taking the role of pesky interrogator, his serrated tones and viscous globules cutting through the kinetic din dished out by Wright and Noble. In moments it’s impossible to decipher where the output of one musician - synthetic tones, the bowed cymbals, or the feedback-laced saxophone lines - ends, and the pushback of another begins.

Atlantis reveals a more open-ended spectrum, ranging from the delicate to the crushing, unfolding at the hands of Chantler, Wright, and Noble. Metallic rustling and throbbing snare bombs hang pregnantly in the air, as twinned abstractions dance between the ethereal and the punishing, transporting the listener into another world. Absolutely incredible from start to finish. Atlantis breathes new life into the contemporary field of European improvised music, stepping far afield from what we might expect.

Recorded during the summer of 2019, while they were on a residency in rural Sweden, Andersabo is the product of the longstanding and fruitful working relationship of John Chantler and Danish saxophonist, Johannes Lund. Following on their 2017 cassette, Endless Sky, it is their second recorded outing, and breaks incredible new ground.

Andersabo might be best understood as a series of sonic spaces, indicated through each work’s titles - Back of the House, Open Field & Forest, Under the Barn Floor - within which the floorboards of a barn, a grassy field, distant hills, insects, the pulse of an electric fence, or a passing tractor, threaded with the tones and responses of Lund’s saxophone and Chantler’s pump organ and synth - are given equal presence and voice. A clear, conceptual extension of both artists’ long standing pursuits of collaboration and the building of context, whether creatively or as facilitators, notably via Chantler’s Edition Festivals, and Lund’s work within the Danish community as a founder of the legendary space, Mayhem - Andersabo represents a rigorously forward thinking rendering of utopian sound, inextricable from the joy, playfulness, and humor with which it was made. Two artists bound by friendship, dramatically opening the sense of creative possibility for the next.

An intricate, thrillingly unbridled blast of carefully controlled sonic anarchy, pushing at the perceptual boundaries of conversant sound, Andersabo captures the collision of two sympathetic, but often radically different, creative pursuits - Chantler’s subtle complexity, composing for electronics, modular synthesis, and acoustic instruments, and Lund’s full tilt improvisations, pointedly defying long standing expectations and syntaxes applied to his chosen instrument - in open dialog with landscape beyond.

With touchstones as vast as 1970s musical minimalism, drone, field recording, and free improvisation, the result is astounding and filled with surprise. As adventurous and ambitious as contemporary experimental music gets, it’s an incredible reminder of what this music is all about.