“Up the Turret Mil” explores a mix of trumpets, guitars, and pianos combined with laptop glitch, sampling, and musique concrète. Many songs began as experiments with laptop and electronic-acoustic treatments on the trumpet and bridge Johnson’s many influences – from free jazz to folk music.

Rich Johnson - trumpet, laptop, guitar, and electronics
All compositions by Rich Johnson (modosonic)
Produced by Rich Johnson

Press:

MilkFactory.co.uk:
"'Rich Johnson’s debut album is a vastly eclectic and thrilling collection which never quite settles for one genre or another, yet manages to remain fluid and consistent all the way through. Johnson has created with Up The Turret Mil a pretty impressive and unique record and positioned himself alongside some of the most exciting contemporary jazz musicians around in the process."



Toxicpete.co.uk:
"'Up The Turret Mill,' I suppose, could be likened to Terry Riley meets Stockhausen; take the more melodic, trance-like Riley and shake in some of Karlheinz's angular and spiky outpourings and you'll start to get a little closer to where Rich Johnson is going... His music has a feeling of intelligence from an intuitive perspective - it's as if the inner, slightly more introspective musician is vying with the outer, extroverted techno-wizard...

'Up The Turret Mil' by Rich Johnson is experimentation with heart and soul - there is a point to this work, and there is an end product - if you can get your head aligned with Rich Johnson's oscillating musical world, you might just find that heart and soul for yourself and be able to drink in its unique and quite intoxicating elixir - you might just find the gold in the potion..."



Vital Weekly:
"Nicely atmospheric, put together in a nice way, good moves, nice pieces. I read in the press text that this is a grower, and I think, you're damn right, this album is a grower. An odd bunch of pieces, more like a compilation, but then one in which all the pieces seem to fit in neatly. A grower indeed."



TerraScope.co.uk:
"Although the music is strange and experimental, it never becomes harsh or discordant, maintaining an inner harmony and a fragile surrealism, vibrant yet controlled. Definitely a grower, “Up the Turret Mil” is an album that can surprise every time it is heard, the lightness of touch just one of its many wonders."



Cookshop:
"One more gent that deserves some spouting off before the year's end, as some Norwegian label has seen fit to release his solo debut. Our dude hails from New York but has priorly gotten down with Nordics on a Rune Grammofon outing last year.

As eccentric as Opsvik & Jennings might be, it's no surprise now it was Rich also shaking that tree. Quite a nice axis of jazz/folk/laptop lunatics right there."




All About Jazz (Mark Corroto):
If something exists in the netherworld, it is said to be "living in hereafter," or the "afterworld." This ethereal theme, with its delicate, vaporous connotations, is the subject matter of trumpeter Rich Johnson's Up The Turret Mil.

While not a native of the Netherlands in either possible connotation, this New York artist produces sounds from somewhere beyond music, a region located between sound and feeling. His early training was in classical trumpet before studying jazz at the Manhattan School of Music. He is a member of We Can Build You, with Jason Rigby and Jonathan Goldberger, and Voice of the Turtle: a laptop duo with Scott Anderson.

This disc was conceived, recorded, and mixed by Johnson in 2007, with him playing all parts on trumpet, laptop, and guitar. This might suggest that Up The Turret Mil could be a reworked (or overworked) affair—it's not. The stark minimalism (or restraint) is that of simple sonorities and patterns. His trumpet manipulations are reminiscent of Jon Hassell, Rob Mazurek, and Ben Neill.
Although a trumpeter by title, Johnson doesn't present a top-heavy brass record; his spartan delivery is the trick here, neither flooding the music with natural or manipulated sound. Choosing his words (notes) carefully, he divines this otherworld of buoyancy—he is just as apt to rely on guitar or computer flutter as the center of a track. The netherworld Rich Johnson occupies makes ambient music interesting and improvisation unnaturally coherent.



All About Jazz (Mark F. Turner):
Rich Johnson's first solo release delicately meshes acoustic instruments (acoustic guitar, piano and trumpet) with technology (laptop computer and sampling) to create a fascinating collage of sound. Like seminal artists, the New York based musician is adept in both traditional and nontraditional idioms as witnessed on saxophonist Jason Rigby's Translucent Space (Fresh Sound, 2006) and on the music duo Opsvik and Jennings' Commuter Anthems (Rune Grammofon, 2007).

Though Up the Turret Mil follows the evolving electronica ideas, there is nothing experimental about these well thought-out compositions. Yes, there are computerized backdrops and processed rhythms, but Johnson's triumphs in giving the machine a soul by presenting music that has feeling as well technological advances. The surrealistic qualities of the opening "Squinting Skyward" contain static trumpet-speak: mouthpiece whispers and elongated tones, all within a theme that moves like the opening of a door into another realm.

Johnson is like an aural alchemist, providing a careful stroke here, a tonal touch there, the inclusion of real and processed colors—changing mood or tempo as in the jerky sequences that bounce on "Ignite a Noise," while juxtaposing with a muted-processed horn. One of the most moving compositions is "Harvester," a simply gorgeous ballad with acoustic guitar, piano, and an array of noise.

Trying to recognize the intriguing host of sounds that Johnson manipulates can be fun while listening to the recording—toy-like, metallic, glass, bells, distortion, patched and synthesized, keyboards, or was that a sampled typewriter? All of these are used in a minimalist fashion, fading in and out, non-obtrusive and varied from track-to-track.

The overall tone of the recording is mysterious, similarly traveling into unknown yet mesmerizing locations: the sound of a new India in "The Loves of Zero," with its exotic percussion-like cadence; space travel to an alien planet in "I Trap Totem Pulp"; or one of the strangest hip-hop jazz clubs (most likely not on Earth) in "After a Tectonic Melt Purr," where Johnson delivers some nifty drum-sequencing.

The title track totally rocks out with thrashing guitar synth sound yet without a raging backbeat (subliminal perhaps?), which brings up a debatable point: can a musician create art with just a laptop and few instruments? The answer is, as Rich Johnson proves on Up the Turret Mil: most definitely.




All About Jazz (Nic Jones)
Trumpeter Rich Johnson might be said to be engaging with the present; in a way, that's true of so few of his contemporaries. He produces music that's steeped in the culture of sampling, and similar examples of magpie-like curiosity. At the same time, he fashions music that is as striking as anything out there. This is an achievement that might be modest, especially in these days of seemingly diminishing musical returns. But Up the Turret Mil still bodes well for the future.

On the happiest of notes, Johnson's music also scratches away at the surface of various muzaks. The joy of his subversion is that of an individual let loose in some place so purged of potential pastimes that he's faced with no other option. "The Loves of Zero" hints, in its muted trumpet lines, at Miles Davis caught in a soundscape of someone else's fashioning. The unnerving antisepticism of Chicago indie-rock band Town and Country, along with the singularity of Erik Satie's works for piano, are at the fore on "Harvester." The resulting music sounds like that of an individual who is relatively isolated from mainstream society, yet absolutely besotted with the few elements he knows of it.

Small sounds serve a purpose in Johnson's world. "Shoreline Frequency," at least in part, is the worst of a sensibility for which no sound is too trivial, even while the piece has nothing in the way of harmonic evolution. Those small sounds, on the intermittent occasions when they merge into something that passes for a motif, form the basis for what development there is. However, it's not to the extent that tropes—such as those old standbys of beginning, middle and end—have any significant role to play.

"After a Tectonic Melt Purr" is music purged of every excess, to the point at which it's astringent. Drums lend impetus, as they inevitably do, but even this is broken; some kind of concession to the world of the beat, even while that very thing is surplus to requirements. By its very nature, the beat is associated with a world for which Johnson appears to have little time, but the escapism this implies is not a cornerstone of the music.

Instead, this is the work of a sensibility absorbed by the world, but only at the point at which it breaks down; when technology becomes not so much a servant of humanity, but rather a law unto itself. Up the Turret Mil is not bounded by the physical, by dint of the fact that it's not a product of it.



LeicesterBangs.co.uk:
"The calm, serene and organic nature of the majority of the CD is augmented, not overshadowed by the avant-garde free-jazz intrusions."



Adequacy.net:
"Up the Turret Mil dodges the mega-crescendo format that underwrites so much noise, ambient and harsh alike. Rich Johnson has built an appealing, occasionally beautiful theater for the microdramas of our quantum age.."



WhisperinandHollerin.com:
”'Rich Johnson's atmospheric and rewarding debut album focuses on textures more than beats. It smoothly cuts and pastes laptop glitch with samples of trumpets, guitars and piano. The effect is to produce the type of lush experimental ambience that graces established labels like Leaf and Rune Grammofon.

It comes as no surprise to learn that Johnson has already contributed to recordings on the latter. The minimalist tone makes it an album that creates a gentle mood and one which glides calmly rather than imposing on the listener. If the spirit is willing, the album's understated organic pulse is one that has the capacity to be both absorbing and transporting."