TRAILS from Ottawa to Toronto, plays the Drake Underground Jun 4

"A dream, you're close, we rise, expose, meadows, 
You paint I pose, we decompose, and time slows" 

The silent sounds of Fogo found on 'All This Here,' new album by Jonas Bonnetta now available

Jonas Bonnetta
All This Here
Idea of North Recordings

By Will McGuirk

Somehow Jonas Bonnetta has captured the silence of a place like Fogo Island on his new album, “All This Here.”

There is an exhibit at the AGO of artist Yayoi Kusma, called 'Infinity Mirrors'. There are a lot of dots, there are a lot of dots in Kusama’s works. At the AGO visitors are given a sheet of dots and they can place them in a white furnished room, the idea being I guess that the colourful dots bring the space into relief.

But the dot is not the thing. The space between the dot is the thing, the space is where the art is.

There is a quote attributed to Miles Davis about it being the notes you don’t play that matter. It’s the space between the notes you play that matter.

Bonnetta’s album is about space and the silence of space. His music frames the silence of Fogo, gives its form, brings the emptiness into relief and it is there the majesty of this All This Here rests.

Although presented in several named songs, with intervals, the album should be listened to as a whole, in one sitting, to understand how sonically erudite it is.

The music is a poetic explanation of how Fogo is. There are no words spoken or sung and yet the story of island life unfolds. One hears there the long slow creak of wooden boats nuzzling each other in the harbour as they rise and fall on the tide, there the low burr of the fog horn, in there the swipe of a lighthouse beam passing, like a slap, felt more than heard; the barely there moan of a bagpipe, the slight squeaking of a fiddle and with it a feeling of familiarity, with a people never met, with the sense of lives lived, a history, invisible companions at ease with the come-from-away, on here sharing this place, this afterthought of Newfoundland.

And yet none of those sounds exist on this record. This is not a recording of the sounds of Fogo; waves, gulls, winds. This is not the dots. One simply cannot express silence with sounds but one can with feeling and this is what Mika Rosen does on violin, Anne Mueller does on cello and Bonetta tasks himself with on piano, and on synthesizer. Somehow they create a place that is not seen or heard or even touched but it is experienced.

'All This Here' began as the soundtrack to a documentary of the island and the unique architecture built there by Todd Saunders. The soundtrack was the groundwork for this record and if one closes one’s eyes while listening one gets too, the sense, at times of architecture looming in the darkness. One hears their stillness.

While Bonetta, Rosen and Mueller construct the sounds on the album there are intervals of recordings, of cars, of footsteps, but beyond these real sounds there is little of the human on the album. Bonnetta manages to be an invisible observer of Fogo Island throughout the 16 tracks but he chooses to reveal himself on the final one, “Fogo (Evening)”. On this track Bonnetta adds rhythm, a beat, an order to the pace of Fogo. Here he shows his hand and places himself on the island, if only to wave us off.

Once I visited the Aran Islands off the west coast of Ireland. I am Irish, Dublin and in my late 20s I went out to the island of Inis Mor and as soon as I set foot on the rock, for it is just that, a 300 foot above sea level high rock in the Atlantic, the only soil is the compost of thousands of years of seaweed dragged in from the icy waters, as soon as the ferry from Galway docked and I stepped out and on to the land it was as if a flurry of souls, uncountable numbers, surged from the stone and through me and wrapped me and I have never felt so much at home in a place as I did on that rock. It spoke to my genes, sang to the deepest part of me and I awoke and knew myself.

I suspect this rock on the other side of the Atlantic may have given Bonnetta a similar experience. There is an expertise in his sonic storytelling which only comes from living it. He knows this place, knows it deeply and channels all of it through these tracks.

Photo by Colin Medley

In Their Own Words - an interview with Evening Hymns' Jonas Bonnetta

By Will McGuirk

In between working and recording with Evening Hymns, Jonas Bonnetta has been working and recording his own solo work. Bonnetta's debut ambient album, "All This Here" will be released Apr 27 2018 on Idea of North Records. The record began as the score to the documentary film "Strange And Familiar: Architecture On Fogo Island". The doc was directed by Marcia Connolly and Katherine Knight. It tells the story of architect Todd Saunders and his design and construction of the Fogo Island Inn as well as artist studios on the island, which is part of Newfoundland.

Slowcity.ca interviewed Bonnetta by email.

SlowCity.ca: How did it come about you were chosen to score the documentary on Fogo?

JB: "The editor of the film tempted in some of my music and the producers connected with the piece and wanted to use it. This lead to a discussion about me writing new pieces to fit the film. I got lucky. I was given a tonne of footage from the film to score to and it was the first time I think that I was actually working with visuals to create the music. The landscape of Fogo Island is so incredibly inspiring that it made the job such a joy. I also got to see the film transform as the editors cut the film multiple times trying to tell the story. It was a lot of me sitting in the studio making drones while staring at the ocean crashing."

SC: Do you think sound creates a sense of place, a uniqueness? Was it that voice you were seeking?

JB: "I truly do. That's what I have been after with this record and with my field recording practice. I have been using field recordings for years. They've been embedded on every record I've made with my band Evening Hymns and they're central to my workflow with my ambient project. I believe that embedding these sounds helps to establish the listener in the place that I'm writing for/about. Because so much of my ambient work is based on place it's integral that I grab sounds from those places. It's also very important for me to put headphones on and walk in these places and listen in this magnified way to get a sense of what the soundscape is and how important those sounds are with the identity of the place. That practice has become it's own beast for me now. I'm amassing such a huge catalogue of sounds from places I travel to. It's obsessive and I'm not sure exactly how I'll use them yet but they seem to be useful from time to time. I edited a bunch of sounds from Barcelona, Palma, and Dawson City together last year for World Listening Day so I guess I find homes for these pieces"  (See Soundcloud link below)

SC: Why did you want the ambient random sounds around the recordings, why was anchoring the sound in a certain time important?

JB: "Well my process starts with the collecting and foraging for sounds. These are then manipulated using software called lloopp in max/msp and then from there I begin improvising over the abstracted field recordings. Those are guiding me in a sense. I just got back from Fogo last week where we drove up and down the island multiple times listening to the record and I think it really fits that landscape and all those "ambient random sounds" are from that place whether it's a mic dropped into the bushes along the ocean or a dog barking on a back porch in Joe Batt's Arm. I like to remember the places I go by the sounds I hear. Because all the music I make is initially a selfish act this is my way of triggering those memories for me and taking me back to my amazing time on Fogo Island."

(I paid a visit to Jonas some years back when he was working for composer R. Murray Schafer on an on-site art project)
SC: That was a great day spent with you at Schafer's. Tell me about his book, "The Tuning of the World" and how it has affected your musical journey?

JB: "Well "The Tuning Of The World" really just helped give me an awareness of the importance of the soundscape. It made me open my ears more, got me thinking about the sounds that are around us constantly and how they infest our lives, for good or bad. He also talks about how the soundscape has changed and that's an interesting thing to think about. Would love to spend my life "archiving" the soundscape of Fogo or somewhere like that to see how it changes over the course of 50 years. His book definitely inspired me to listen deeper which has led me to making more field recordings and paying more attention to what is happening around me sonically. This of course is great for me on so many levels. It's meditative. It helps my music. Inspires me. It most definitely grounds me.

"I've recently returned from 10 days in Big Sur, California, where I'm making a similar record to "All This Here" in the sense that we collected field recordings from all over the coast and then improvised over them. I had Schafer's book with me there and it helped guide our thinking while we were working. It's a really nice practice to share the recording process with people and to watch their awareness of the soundscape change. I was working with this amazing violinist Edwin Huizinga in California and he participated in the recordings out in the woods and by the ocean and he became almost childlike in his excitement for hearing this familiar place with a completely different set of ears. I think that most people would benefit from taking mics into the woods and listening closer to what's around us."

Q: So far you are playing the Drake on May 27, any other shows coming up?

JB: "Yes! Ottawa on the 24th of May, Montreal on the 25th and hoping for a show on the 26th too. We've got some other cool things to announce as we get closer to the shows too."

Evening Hymns' Jonas Bonetta to release ambient album 'All This Here' Apr 27

It has been a while since we have had recorded music from Jonas Bonnetta (aka Evening Hymns) so its welcome news indeed to hear he will release an album on Friday Apr 27.  The sonic musings of "All This Here", an album of ambient music, were inspired by Fogo Island in Newfoundland and was came into being as the soundtrack for a documentary, "Strange and Familiar: Architecture on Fogo Island." It melds field recordings from Fogo with studio workings featuring Mika Rosen and Anne Müeller on strings. The record will be available on Idea of North Recordings (an allusion perhaps to Glenn Gould's work of the same name) and there will be a performance of the material at the Drake in Toronto May 27. A track from the album, "Little Seldom, a town on Fogo, is available now.

“I had wanted to capture the pulse of the water around Fogo Island and also wanted to make sure that there was an element of fiddle music on the soundtrack,” says Bonnetta. “I scored out all of the violin sections and then went to Ottawa to track the strings with my friend Mika Posen. We set up my mobile recording equipment in the living room of her parent's magical house and spent an afternoon tracking the strings for a few songs on the record. Her parents had this amazingly deep collection of folk music that we were able to sift through including a bunch of LP's of Newfoundland fiddle music. I still really hear all of that on this recording.” - he says in a press release.