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Jun 26, 2024 By Caleb Campbell Photography by Liz Kiger

Samn Johnson is a Michigan-based composer, producer, and historical linguist. Their music unites seemingly divergent fields, crafting compositions that feel like equal parts academic works and complex experimentalist art pieces. Most recently, they have shared a 2022 album, Ageless Sea, written for chamber choir, chamber orchestra, electronics, and rock band, and an EP, First Book for Piano, which finds him performing their own piano works.

Their latest album, Consolation, finds Johnson setting ambient electronic textures against poetry pulled from the Roman philosopher Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy. Meanwhile, singer, writer, and medievalist Tis Kaoru Zamler-Carhart provides the record’s vocals, singing in the original Latin. The full album is out on June 28th via Innova Records, and today Johnson and Zamler-Carhart have shared an early listen to one of the record’s centerpieces, “Πάντ’ εφοραν (One),” premiering with Under the Radar.

“One” acts as the entrancing resolution to the album. It is precisely detailed and intimately constructed, recalling the sort of abstract painting that requires you to look deeper into its smallest brushstrokes to truly appreciate the artistry at work. In a similar fashion, the piece feels placid on its surface. Zamler-Carhart’s vocal line stands frozen in a hypnotic monotone as Johnson’s ambient electronics wash over them, moving in a meditative dance around their Latin intonations. Yet, each resulting chord fits together like an intricate puzzle, each created with a distinct intention.

As Johnson explains, “This piece was one of the most satisfying for me to put together, and feels like the calm end point that the more turbulent pieces earlier in the album are arcing towards. When I was working on this I loved getting lost in the wash of resonance of these just-tuned chords, and the last section where the ticking rhythms put themselves together into a melody still gives me the chills when I hear it. Sometimes sitting there doing all the math to make these acoustic effects work I’d wonder if I was onto something that made an audible difference or if I was just lost in the sauce and seduced by the ratios, but when I hear how this turned out I think, absolutely, it was worth it.”

They continue, explaining the piece’s inspirations: “The title of ‘Πάντ’ εφοραν (One)’ refers to the One of Neoplatonic philosophy. We know from other sources that Boethius was a Christian, yet he does not explicitly invoke Christian concepts in his Consolation, instead describing God in Neoplatonic terms. The arc of the Consolation involves seeking union with this One, the source from which all forms (the immaterial essences of things) emanate, unchanging and dependent on nothing outside itself. This song comes at the end of the album, concluding this arc as the poet dissolves back into this timeless source.

Evoking timelessness in music, a fundamentally time-based medium, is a paradoxical project, and I went about it here using static harmonies and a vocal line that barely departs from one repeated pitch. With the notion of the One being selfsame and self-generating in mind, I also employed a number of ‘self-generating’ musical techniques. These include contrapuntal devices like canon, as well as acoustic effects including combination tones (a phenomenon wherein certain pitches, when sounding together, produce the sensation of a lower tone that is not actually being produced by any instrument), and repeatedly speeding up rhythms until they begin to be perceived as pitches. These sorts of techniques connect to a pre-modern aesthetic that Boethius would have lived in, where numbers and proportions have cosmological, allegorical meaning and are deeply interwoven with reality.”

Check out the piece below. Consolation is out everywhere on June 28th via Innova Records.