Johan G. Winther - The Rupturing Sowle - CD

JOHAN G WINTHER from Gothenburg, Sweden has released 7 albums with his extraordinary and terribly underrated rock band SCRAPS OF TAPE, 3 albums with blackened hardcore band BLESSINGS and a stunning debut album with his new post rock outfit BARRENS last March, which ended up in many year's end lists of 2020, including #7 at Where Postrock Dwells' Top albums of the year.
'The Rupturing Sowle' is his solo album, which he recorded in voluntary pre-corona isolation in a small cabin in the Swedish woods.
„I became a father for the first time in 2010, and anyone who has children can attest to the fundamental life changes this brings with it. It forced me to re-evaluate myself down to my core being and made me examine my life and my experiences more thoroughly“, comments Winther on the motivational driving force behind the album.
„I started to dream parts of the same dream over and over, bits and pieces slowly coming together into a narrative of sorts. In the summer of 2012, we retreated to our cabin in the middle of Sweden and I started to record pieces to fit the narrative in my head. One of the core concepts were the inborn duality of the human soul, and I tried to represent this on the album by presenting as many ideas and musical parts as pairs, with a light and a dark side to try to create a persistent sense of tension throughout. Beautiful sounds mixed with ugly sounds,
sadness mixed with joy, acoustic sounds and electronic sounds.“
This emotional duality and the diversity of sounds and moods that come with it are what define The Rupturing Sowle – just like in every good dish, where contrasting directions of flavour contradict and compliment one another in equal measure: the salty and the sweet the bitter and the spicy.
The cabin where Winther recorded almost everything on the album plays a pivotal role in the creation of a certain ambiance, a sense of place which is very present in these recordings. „It’s the one place in this world where I can go and feel totally at home, where I am constantly inspired and at ease. Several tracks and layers were re-amped in the studio room, and I kept every creak of a chair or floor plank in the recordings. All these different sounds of both the cabin and the surrounding area were transformed in my mind to characters in the narrative. I recorded the open fire in the living room and the creaking of the floating jetty down by the lake, birds singing and eerie sounds emanating from the forest in the middle of the night and wrote around them.“
While you listen and absorb the grandeur of these recordings, here are track-by-track comments by Johan G. Winther himself, explaining the narrative of the album.