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KINEMASTIK KAVE SESSIONS VOL.2

KAPITOL K / JOHN JOANNA

KAPITOL K

Almost like a series of manipulated field recordings that have an ancient, ritualistic quality, Goatherder shimmers with Balearic strangeness, rooted in an earthy outer-national dance music tradition.
The Vinyl Factory

Goatherder is the seventh album from underground London producer Kristian Craig Robinson, AKA Capitol K. This ace manipulator of audio and punk warlord of groove has crossed a tapestry of styles and approaches with his own secret compass since 1998. This latest work was developed and recorded in his native Malta, where he built a studio in a cave (a former goat stable). K gathered bamboo instruments collected around the world, including an ancient Quecha reeded pipe (his new-found lead instrument), and various resonating vessels and percussive objects including dry fennel storks collected from Punic troglodyte sites, and atonal flutes built from fresh cut farmland reed. Ritualistic improvisations took place over a series of seasonal visits, awakening genetic memory and plant communication. Back in London the tracks were interfaced and expanded with post-industrial machine beat and bass guitar lock down. Homage is paid to New Age synthscapes, while a Spirit Jazz overtone arrives from K’s recent years as the sonic muscle behind a plethora of luminous albums born in his Total Refreshment Studio.

JOHN JOHANNA

“Something that sits between the Incredible String Band and Timber Timbre… one’s gut feeling is Johanna’s a talent that’s only just getting started”
The Quietus

“Utterly heavenly, beautifully balanced, fantastically sparse. New album ‘I’ll Be Ready When The Great Day Comes’ is a striking piece of work”
Clash Music premiere for ‘Bound’

“His debut mini-album has a rustic psych-blues flavour, like those British singers at the start of the Seventies who wanted to play folk but had absorbed so much LSD it came out sounding unlike what had come before.”
ARTS DESK

John Johanna is a singer and multi-instrumentalist who records to cassette and reel to reel tape at his home in rural Norfolk. John Johanna’s eclectic output uses psychedelia and oriental tonalities, primal gospel blues and folk – among other ingredients – to create a body of diverse yet coherent devotional music. Intensely personal and yet totally universal.
His debut release the Mini Album ‘I’ll Be Ready When The Great Day Comes’ via Faith & Industry was released on 26th January 2018.
The eight tracks trace a line between devotional music of east and west.
He is “inspired by and aspires to approach the spirit of the (to me) anonymous musicians I hear in folk field recordings from around the world, in classical Indian dhrupad singers, in outsider musicians, in the hissing cassette recordings of the underground electric guitarists of NW Africa and so on. And I sometimes use ‘non-Western’ scales and tunings for two reasons: firstly I find them to be effective ways to enter different states of mind and trance states, and secondly because my faith, Eastern Orthodox Christianity (the primal form of Christianity), is an Oriental one. And so for me it feels right and fitting that I should sometimes use Oriental scales when I make my devotional music”.