The Third Eye

Today, Johnny Bell released one of my favorite ambient records of the year, Field Trips, via the Texas-based label Aural Canyon. The Third Eye gave it a glowing review, but I wanted to go deeper to discover its inspirations and creation process.

Field Trips isn’t a typical ambient record. Johnny built the record around found sounds, field recordings, tape loops, and improvised instrumentation created and captured at various locations near his home in Northern New Mexico, at the base of Chiricahua mountains in Southeastern Arizona, and along the Pacific Coast of California. The result is a stunning collection of eight tracks that dissolve the boundaries between musical and non-musical sounds.

Like other recent records from Aural Canyon (notably, Justin Sweatt’s North Texas Electric), Field Trips is also very much situated in the geographies where the field recordings were captured. In this sense, the record is a “visit made for first-hand observation purposes” and also an ode to Bell’s northern New Mexico home and the desert and mountainous areas he traversed.

I’ve corresponded with Johnny since The Third Eye reviewed his new record, and I recently emailed him a few questions. Check out my interview with Johnny Bell below. He tells me more about Field Trips, his biggest musical inspirations, his deep dive into the traumatic history of the U.S. Southwest, and more. The interview has been lightly edited for grammar, syntax, and clarity.

Interview with Johnny Bell

Third Eye: Thanks for doing this interview! Can you tell us more about yourself and your music?

Johnny Bell: Thanks for having me! I’m honored to participate. 

I was born and raised in Northern New Mexico, in the city of Santa Fe, on the unceded ancestral lands of the Tewa people. After spending most of my young adult life away from the area, I am now settled at my family’s old homestead. My partner and I are raising our two young children in the house that my great-grandfather built, and we’re growing food in the same dirt that my great-grandmother once cultivated. I feel very fortunate to have the opportunity to be the current steward of this land. 

My music is primarily centered around the 5-string banjo and a traditional style of playing commonly called clawhammer, frailing, or overhand. I strive to push the instrument beyond its traditional stranglehold and bring it into unorthodox and progressive settings. 

Third Eye: Your process for creating your new record, Field Trips, interests me. For example, you write that the compositional process became “a practice, wherein each individual capture became a journey or field trip unto itself.” Can you tell me more about the process of creating the record?

Johnny: Field Trips began as a very low-expectation experiment. Initially, I had no intention of creating something that I would share, much less release it as an “album.” 

The project began last fall when I acquired a portable digital field recorder. I wanted a device that would make high-quality, binaural recording more accessible–instead of spending 20-30 minutes setting up a mic, running an XLR cable, powering up a computer and digital interface, and routing and setting levels in my DAW, I wanted the freedom to power up and hit record anywhere, anytime. I started taking the recorder everywhere! 

This easy accessibility led me to begin capturing ambient field recordings of my surroundings. City traffic and night sounds from the roof of my house. Neighborhood dogs barking. Bird calls and forest streams while hiking in the nearby Sangre de Cristo mountains. The kitchen fan hum and the water boiler rumbles. Everything was a sound source and everywhere was a recording studio. It reinvigorated my excitement for recording! 

I’ve been playing the banjo for about 20 years and always explore and improvise with the instrument. A lot of my process as a songwriter is recording these spontaneous ideas, whether it’s a melody or a riff, a new tuning or texture. As my adventures with the field recorder began to take up a big part of my days, I also captured this daily stream-of-consciousness record of these somewhat improvisational banjo moments. And often, I did both at once by bringing my banjo along with me on my field trips.

After harvesting hours and hours of found sounds, ambient field recordings, and uncommitted banjo ideas, I decided to start dragging some of these disparate sounds into my DAW, and I began layering them. 

I didn’t have any intentions of building an album at first–it was really just out of curiosity of what these sounds would entice when put together. The initial results were fascinating! The layers gave these loose musical ideas a solid sense of place and purpose and evoked more feelings than they would have on their own. 

As the collages began to take shape, I committed myself to a “first idea is best idea” approach. I would rebel against everything I had told myself was a “rule” of album making or studio recording. No rules. No “perfect” or “flawless” takes. Nothing was off limits. Nothing is precious and experimentation is key–I was completely and totally liberated!

Aural photographs

Third Eye: How long did it take, and was there something meditative and healing about how you went about it? 

Johnny: As anyone who has seen a recording project through from conception to completion and eventual release can attest, these things can take a very, very long time! Field Trips was a relief in that it took a relatively short time frame–I spent about 3 months compiling, layering, and organizing the sounds. It was very healing in the sense that I was able to complete and release a project in a very short amount of time without much fuss or stress about what an album is “supposed” to sound like.

Third Eye: What I love most about Field Trips is the way it really blurs the lines between musical and non-musical sounds. What inspired you to experiment with this type of music-making process?

Johnny: A few years back, I was lucky to meet the legendary sound sculptor Oswaldo Macia. We became friends, and I ended up working with him on a couple of his museum installations. It was through directly experiencing Oswaldo’s work that I became interested in the art of field recording and the way a high-quality ambient recording can really place you in the time and moment and location where the recording was made–how the captured soundscape serves as an aural photograph. 

So, it was Oswaldo’s influence that inspired me to obtain a portable recorder and start recording my surroundings. Everything from the mundane, daily sounds that we take for granted to the expansive environmental sounds of the beautiful places that I would experience during hikes with my dog.

With each of the recordings that were incorporated into Field Trips, I can listen back and be immediately transported to the place where it was recorded and access very clear memories of being in that particular place at that particular time. 

Often, when I’m recording improvisational moments on my banjo I’m doing so to capture an idea that I’ve had as a composer, with the intention of returning to these ideas later to flesh them out into whole songs or complete compositions.

Before I got the field recorder I would just record on the voice memo app on my phone but the incredible fidelity of these recordings on the field recorder made the improvised ideas sound complete in a way. 

I didn’t feel like turning these moments into fully fleshed out, structured musical compositions would be the right complement for the ambient sounds that I had been capturing on my field trips–as I was layering them it felt like it made more sense to use these impromptu moments on the banjo as-is.

So rather than fleshing out and finalizing them as compositions on banjo I used them in their raw form, in an attempt to complement the uncontrolled field recordings with equally uncontrolled musical sounds.

Sonic footprints

Third Eye: Field Trips is also a record inherently situated in a specific geography due to many of the sounds captured in Arizona, New Mexico, and California. Can you tell me more about the places where you captured these field recordings and give us a sense of the grandeur of these settings?

Johnny: Music and albums that I really love tend to evoke a strong sense of place wherein I can close my eyes, listen, and be transported to another location, whether that location is imaginary or very real.

As Field Trips began to take shape, I made a conscious decision to attempt to explicitly evoke a place for the listener. Living in the mountain west, I try not to take for granted the beauty that surrounds me on a daily basis. I really wanted to share these beautiful locations with the listener through the unique sonic footprint of these places. As I mentioned, a lot of the sounds were captured in the Santa Fe National Forest up in the Sangre de Cristo mountains and some came from further west. 

Last October we took a trip out to California. We wanted to share the Pacific Coast with our youngest son who had never been to the ocean. I brought my field recorder along and made a point to capture sounds along the way.

En route we stopped in Southeastern Arizona and spent some time at the base of the Chiricahua Mountains. The piece titled “Under the Sycamore at Rock Creek” explicitly refers to the location of the recording. It’s the most simple and unlayered track on the album; nothing was added or mixed in.

Just the binaural recording of me playing banjo under a massive sycamore tree which grows along the bank of a creek lined with enormous rocks. The tree was dormant and the massive leaves had dried but had yet to fall so as the wind blew they made a very distinct rustling sound. It almost sounds like a downpour of heavy rain. I found a meditative banjo line and played along trying to follow the natural dynamics of the sound as the wind intensified and settled. 

The piece titled ‘Re-emergence’ was built around a recording that I captured while visiting Santa Cruz Island which is the largest in an archipelago that make up the Channel Islands National Park off the coast of Ventura, CA.

The islands are home to an incredibly diverse ecosystem with many species being endemic to the islands. These islands are pristine, and provide an experience of what California’s Pacific Coast would have been like before colonization and modern development. The ambient nature recording was captured on Scorpion Beach at the base of these massive coastal cliffs with seagulls and island scrub-jays combing the sand. 

Third Eye: I’m guessing you’ve been inspired by many ambient musicians and probably some experimental musicians, too. Who are the ambient artists who have inspired you the most?

Johnny: I’m lucky in that when I returned to Santa Fe about 14 years ago, I fell in with a very vibrant and active experimental music scene that was largely centered around a collective of progressive artists and musicians known as High Mayhem.

Being a sound engineer, I started working with them to help produce concerts and shows in their venue space as well as engineering recording sessions in the studio. This collective really helped me tune my ear to the more adventurous forms of musical expression. 

Through High Mayhem, I got to meet and work with some heavy hitters of experimental music. Folks like Raven Chacon, Tatsuya Nakatani, JA “Dino” Dean, CJ Boyd, Thollem McDonas and Andrew Weathers. In addition to their wide-ranging respective solo work, Raven and Tatsuya play in a trio project with Carlos Santistevan, who is one of High Mayhem’s founders. Their album, Inhale/Exhale, came out a couple years ago on Other Minds and it’s heavy and beautiful.

I gravitate towards experimental music that uses acoustic instruments in new and unpredictable ways. Laura Ortman blends violin and electronics in a really impressive way. Her work is powerful and cathartic. I really love Walt McClements’ “ambient accordion” album A Hole in The Fence as well as he and Mary Lattimore’s recent duo album, Rain on The Road. Another great example of this approach is the work of Old Saw–ambient Old West soundscapes produced using pedal steel, banjo, fiddle and tape loops.  

This isn’t ambient by definition, but SUMAC’s newest album, The Healer, is in regular rotation. It’s a massive and unpredictable listening experience, very challenging but consistently rewarding. I had the opportunity to see them perform live a few weeks ago and it was an inspiring and invigorating experience. I’ve also been digging into the work of Moor Mother lately–I really love her work with Irreversible Entanglements and her solo stuff is really intense and powerful.

Everything on Scissortail records is worth checking out. I’ve really been enjoying Two Improvisations by Joshua Massad and Dylan Aycock. It’s a wonderful blend of Eastern and Western styles with Joshua contributing tabla and sitar and Dylan on 12-string acoustic guitar. Also Microfolk by Chaz Knapp, Cy Warner, and Chaz Prymek. It’s a wonderfully atmospheric listening experience made from field recordings, improvised acoustic instrumentation, and tape loops. 

Finally, I’ve discovered hours and hours of excellent new sounds by exploring Aural Canyon’s catalog. Highlights for me so far have been Duncan Park’s Traveler’s Peace, Talk West’s Bartlett Square, Seven Rivers of Fire’s Sanctuary, and Golden Brown’s Kindness. So many consciousness-expanding sounds to explore on that label! 

I wish we had more time–there’s no shortage of wonderful music to list here!

The desert Southwest

Third Eye: Field Trips was released via Aural Canyon, which is quickly becoming one of my favorite independent record labels. Can you tell me more about working with Aural Canyon and how that came about?

Johnny: Working with Matthew has been great and super easy. He’s a really chill and easygoing person who clearly and genuinely loves the projects that he’s putting out. When Field Trips was completed and I made the decision to release and share the work, I identified a short list of indie labels that I thought the work might appeal to. Matthew’s label was at the top of that list and he responded right away to express an interest in it. 

Aural Canyon is part of a long lineage of independent cassette-based labels run by true music heads. These labels provide an invaluable service to artists in helping them find enthusiastic, open-minded listeners for their work. Admittedly, a project like Field Trips has a limited audience. I mean, this isn’t pop music. But AC is helping me find those listeners–it’s truly an honor to have my work placed among these other fine tapes.  

Third Eye: What’s the best book you’ve read recently? And why?

Johnny: Lately, I’ve been doing a deep dive into the history of the place I am from. I believe that the desert Southwest is one of the most traumatized locations in this country if not the entire world. That trauma permeates this place and is still present today. It affects everything from socioeconomic class structures, local government, city-sanctioned celebrations, and what my children are taught in their social studies classes in the public school system. 

This land I live on, where I am from, has been occupied by human inhabitants for at least the last 20,000 years. Nearly 500 years ago, a brutal conquest and colonization of the land began. That history surrounds me and is a part of my history and my family’s history. When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away by Ramón A. Gutiérrez is one of the few books I have come across that tells the story of this land’s conquest from the perspective of the indigenous inhabitants of this place, the Pueblo Indians. It’s a devastating read but a really important one in order to understand New Mexico’s true history. 

Third Eye: Last question – What’s next for you and your music? Are you working on any new projects you can tell us about?

Johnny: I’m scheduled to record with Andrew Weathers at Wind Tide at the end of September. I aim to record some of the more structured and composed progressive banjo pieces I’ve been developing and then work with Andrew to arrange, layer, and expand the sonic palette. I’m holding the intention of making an “American primitive/progressive metal banjo album” (laughter). Andrew is such an enormous talent, and he’s had his hands and ears involved in a huge variety of projects that have resonated with me over the years. I’m really excited to work directly with him.

Additionally, I’ve already started collecting and piecing together sounds and mapping out ideas for the next “field trips”-style project. I’m excited and encouraged, and I can’t wait to share my future work!

Check out Field Trips by Johnny Bell on Bandcamp here.

Johnny Bell: Instagram | Bandcamp | Soundcloud