Chuck Johnson, “Sun Glories”By Ben Arthur · August 16, 2024
Oakland, California
Chuck Johnson’s career has been a long, arduous, and ever-shifting one. Since his solo debut in 2011, he’s come to redefine what folk, country and ambient music can mean. He began in the wake of American primitivism, channeling John Fahey and Robbie Basho on the solo acoustic guitar. In 2016, his sound became electric, incorporating fingerpicking into a rich, synth-laden atmosphere. Soon after, Johnson picked up the pedal steel on Balsams, an album that would redefine both the instrument and his career writ large.
That record was a foray into transforming the traditional country instrument into something ambient, and that journey continues on his latest record, Sun Glories. His first full-length album in three years, it sees Johnson pairing the pedal steel with a wide range of instruments—viola, cello, pump organ, synths—to form an intense, hypnotic work. He even returns to the electric guitar, as those punctuated, jagged notes flow together with the reverbed and fuzzed-out pedal steel. Taking from his experience making soundtracks for HBO’s Burden of Proof and PBS documentaries A Chef’s Life and Somewhere South, his ambient compositions have elevated the visual medium into something more ethereal. On Sun Glories, he proves that visuals aren’t necessary to create a cinematic sonic experience and simultaneously reflects on time and memory.
These pieces grow and shift—often on a minute scale—as he reflects on a singular motif for minutes at a time. He returns to a few notes throughout a piece as his pedal steel whines, evoking the human register. On the album’s third track, “Hovering,” he begins with a low drone that slowly multiples, modulates, and harmonizes. Eventually, around three minutes in, disparate notes pulse together in rhythm. Taken as a whole, the piece calls to mind Steve Reich’s 1989 work “Different Trains” — another reflection on the passage of time and memory; this time, in a postmodern era instead of post-war. Johnson also takes inspiration from Eno: Sun Glories’s liner notes make reference to Eno’s concept of “treatments,” or using the studio as a tool in and of itself. Johnson himself describes this as working beyond “audio effects but also tape, mixing consoles, feedback circuits.” Throughout the song, those subtle details arise: the fullness of the fuzz or the clarity of the delay. Eventually, “Hovering” reaches its ultimate conclusion: The train has entered the station.
Johnson truly slows down time, encouraging the listener to reflect on the passage of it. The album is meant for worn highways, trips across the country, the low hum of the radio accompanying you. It’s for the thinking that goes alongside that, too; the long journeys where we question and shape ourselves. The last track, “Broken Spectre,” makes reference to the sun rising, bisected by the horizon. As the pedal steel glissandos and flows, a deep backbeat slowly rumbles underneath. A drum beat emerges, the instruments fall into place, and the unknown becomes organized. In his music, one can detect a sense of optimism: A new day has begun, and with it comes hope.