Johannes Burström, born 1979 in Umeå, Sweden, now living in Stockholm. Composing music and playing the bass, designing sound for spaces and occasionally using code to make a sound-oriented tool, instrument or website.
In any case, I tend to come back to a kind of primal surprise: When I pluck a string, air moves to places. Sound is sounding. That surprise is what I keep chasing.
I tend to come back to physical presence: how my movement with the double bass shape sound, how sound interacts with a room, how music comes from touch, between bodies, instruments and spaces. Whether composing for headphones, dance, or improvising ensembles, I often start from my relationship with the double bass, other instruments or physical objects: how they sound, feel, and respond.
I tend to come back to feedback between acoustic and digital domains, as a way to mess with the ways sound emerges and behaves. I search for digital processes which are as much about influencing my own playing as altering the instrument’s timbre.
I stay firmly in the betweens of a diversity of practices – instrument building, improvisation, electroacoustic music, coding, waltzes and field recordings – happily sharing space with collaborators, listeners and other co-creators.
I try to embrace the unpredictable, as well as the predictably predictable.