John Reider Holmes is a guitarist and electronic musician who lives and works in southern Sweden. He plays live modular ambient shows locally in Malmö and also works at the label Sound+Matter releasing and promoting underground electronic music. Originally a jazz and blues guitarist, John came to ambient music through an interest in modular synthesis, which is where we find ourselves today, with the release of his modular focussed album, At the turning of the day…
‘At the turning of day…’ is an album that invites you to daydream. It is music that requires you to be in a certain mood to enjoy it and it wants to take you on a journey. The music is non-traditional in the sense that it isn’t composed according to a traditional musical structure of intros, choruses and solos. Most tracks are based around a recurring loop with additional elements. To place this album in a particular genre is difficult. It leans toward cinematic and instrumental music but it’s also ambient and ignorable as well as having a touch of classical music about. Techniques and gear commonly used in ambient music were utilised to create it such as the aforementioned looping as well as a generative sequencer and drone tones.
Eschewing Johns background as a guitarist, with all the traditional rock and pop structures, intros, choruses and solos that go with it, he has embraced the moods and methodologies imposed and inspired by the use of a different technology. As well as utilising his guitar, especially on the intro track, he’s created an album focussing on a Eurorack modular system featuring modules by Expert Sleepers, upon whose label the album is released.
Here’s the intro to the album, The Strings of Hope, the Puppets of Belief, featuring delayed and processed guitar lines, which remind me a little of the guitar work in Steve Reich’s Electric Counterpoint…
The first track is obviously guitar-centred, but the rest of the album tends to explore more ambient territory, with some lovely moments throughout the album. It’s well worth exploring, with some wonderful textures, harmonies and melodic ideas throughout. Here’s the title track to whet your appetite…
Here’s a little of what John has to say about the album…
At the turning of the day…’ celebrates a turning point in my musical career, and the Expert Sleepers disting mk4 and disting EX were a big part of that. Until a year or so before the pandemic I was exclusively a blues, rock and jazz guitarist and played in bands. I gradually switched to modular synthesizer music after being introduced to the ARP Odyssey, Moog Mother 32 and other semi-modular synthesizers as well as getting into the generative ambient music of Brian Eno. I gradually built up a system as I went along, and the disting mk4 was the beginning of that system. The central idea of my setup is that it should be able to do just about anything, or rather, it should be able tackle as many musical ideas that I can throw at it as possible but at the same time fulfill some of the purpose of a band member, hence the large collection of multifunctional and generative modules that reside within it.
The disting EX and mk4 were used on every track for ‘At the turning of the day…’ in central or supporting roles depending on where the music took me. Sometimes I began with an algorithm I had never used before and built music around that and other times I had a specific idea that I tried out and liked the results I got from the disting. One of the EX’s greatest strengths is its capacity for playing chords and, together with the Instruo Harmonaig, I found the perfect modular solution for chordal accompaniment while I played guitar. The other is its capacity to become more or less any kind of ‘voice’ in one’s setup. From a traditional monophonic VCO, to polyphonic sample player, granular synthesizer or wavetable oscillator.
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