Whether composing for film or creating records of windswept, spectral pedal steel, Chuck Johnson imbues his music with a sense of mystery and dynamic tension. His latest album is Music From Burden of Truth, a soundtrack to Cynthia Hill’s HBO docu-series exploring Stephen Pandos’ investigation into the 1987 disappearance of his sister, Jennifer Pandos. Released by All Saints, the synth heavy soundtrack works like an album on its own, but Johnson’s approach to film work involves deep emotional immersion in his subject matter. “With Burden of Proof, the story along with the beautiful and sometimes disorienting visual style struck me as very Lynchian,” he says. “And the event in the story where all these people’s lives are changed forever happens in 1987. In some ways time stopped for a lot of people in that moment, so for some of the music I drew on sounds and production techniques from that era. But at its core the story is about trauma and familial dysfunction, which are familiar to my own life experience and emotions I associate with my childhood. So it was a potent pool of emotions to work from, which at times I had to reign in.” Johnson joined us to discuss the project, his Longform Editions collaboration with JWPaton, and how deep listening lessons he learned from Pauline Oliveros. | j woodbury
Aquarium Drunkard: Burden of Proof was filmed over the course of seven years; how long did you have to compose the music?
Chuck Johnson: Burden of Proof actually began as a two-part film, and when filmmaker Cynthia Hill approached me about composing for it in early 2018, it was essentially finished. But the process of making the film had reactivated the case of Jennifer Pandos’ disappearance and new leads had developed as a result. Then there were whispers about grand juries et cetera, so at several different points in the following years, HBO put the project on pause to see how the case would play out. In the meantime the story became more complex and the form changed into what is now a four part series, so there were lots of changes to the edit and new footage added along the way, and each time that happened it meant new music needed to be composed or changes to the music I had already composed were needed. So it was very off and on from 2019 until 2023. And all of that was delayed and drawn out even further by the pandemic.
AD: You’ve done film work before. How does the process of emotionally connecting to the visuals—and translating those feelings—come together for you? How has it morphed and evolved over the years?
Chuck Johnson: It varies a lot depending on the project. I’ve worked on a couple of series and films that are set in North Carolina, which is where I grew up. So nostalgia and more complicated emotions are sometimes brought up by those visuals, usually of rural spaces, or even by the accents I hear in people’s voices. Sometimes that has resulted in scores with fingerstyle guitar or other traditional sounding music, but not always.
AD: There’s a lot of diversity in the mix, I can almost hear “Low plays soft-rock or soul” on “Night of the Disappearance,” and when your pedal steel comes in, forget about it, whereas the title track almost feels gothic, or Giallo-inspired. What are some soundtracks you’ve connected deeply with over the years?
Chuck Johnson: Thanks! “Night of the Disappearance” is a crucial cue because it’s the moment where you are learning that many people in the film have wildly different ideas about what happened to Jennifer Pandos, or even what she was like as a person, but you are hearing her mother recount the events of that one night that affected everyone in such a similarly brutal way—it’s like a singularity. And that’s where the pedal steel comes in! The story is clouded in mystery but there is clarity in the feeling that everyone in the film shares.
Besides some Badalamenti-esque moments during the heavily stylized reenactment scents, I didn’t consciously draw on score music. I tried to avoid that, in fact! But I’ve been deeply affected by the music and sound in Tarkovsky’s films, Morricone, Bernard Herman, Anton Karas…More recently: Geoff Barrow and Ben Salisbury’s score for Annihilation, Johnny Greenwood’s work with Paul Thomas Anderson, Jóhann Jóhannsson’s score for Arrival, Mica Levi’s music for Under the Skin, and Hildur Guðnadóttir’s sublime work in Tár. For me, sometimes the best scores are barely there, until that one moment where it really affects you and you realize it’s been there all along, helping to bring the story into focus—or to confuse you, as the case may be.
AD: You also worked on A Chef’s Life—from the composer’s end, is the process any different working for a channel like HBO vs public broadcasting?
Chuck Johnson: Well, Cynthia Hill is the filmmaker behind A Chef’s Life and Burden of Proof, so on those projects it was a very direct collaboration between me, Cynthia, and editor Tom Vickers. The working language we have developed over the years seems to always be at play, even though the range of subject matter is obviously pretty huge. Fortunately, I rarely have to deal directly with people from the networks.
AD: I really enjoyed your collaborative piece with JWPaton for Longform Editions, which was inspired by Sol LeWitt’s Loopy Doopy (red and purple). It’s a very disorienting piece. You alluded to Tylenol in your artist statement: was it a beast to mix?
Chuck Johnson: I have friends here in the Bay Area who used to be on the team that installs LeWitt’s works, and they told me that for the Loopy Doopy pieces the installers would have to take Tylenol to cope with the vertigo caused by the intense color interactions and the high scaffolding they worked from. Josh and I wanted to convey that sensation in the piece, which was commissioned by the Art Gallery of New South Wales for their Loopy Doopy exhibition last year.
That said, the process of collaborating with Josh felt very organic and really had no traces of the struggle that might come across haha. Considering that we barely knew each other and were sending audio files back and forth halfway across the planet, it was a remarkably smooth experience: and at every stage from collecting and sharing sounds, then sequencing and arranging them into a piece, then mixing, I think both of our voices and ideas come across in the music.
AD: You also alluded to deep listening, as Pauline Oliveros taught it. You studied at Mills with her; how did your work with her affect your own musical practice moving forward?
Chuck Johnson: There are so many layers to that…Something that has really stuck with me was her idea that at any given time you are in the midst of a composition, you just have to stop and listen to it. It’s like a way to radically accept what is happening in the moment, but with a focus on sound. So that has much broader applications than a musical practice, but it is also very useful to me as a composer.
A lot of the music I make involves setting up a system that—after some initial input—plays itself to some degree, which can be shaped or nudged (or not) by input from me or someone else. Pauline’s ideas come into play in that moment where I decide whether or not my intervention is needed. It even applies to my acoustic guitar music. I use open tunings and drones, and the tuning of the guitar and all the potential harmonics held inside it, and the cyclical patterns of my right hand moving the strings to release those harmonics are like a system that has the potential to excite the acoustics of a space. Melody and chord progressions kind of operate within that context, are supported by that platform.