A Place Elsewhere: In Conversation with Cedie Janson

Liminality has been the buzz term these past several years. Whether it be through press releases, album or song titles, you don’t have to search too far to find it.

Speaking to Karate’s Geoff Farina last month, and he summed it up as good as anyone when he said, “The idea of liminality is being a state in between two states. It feels very much like we’re in the midst of really rapid change, but we don’t understand what the other side of it is going look like.”

Like hearing politics purely through sound, in context, I think liminality can be heard, too, and I can’t think of another artist who has captured this like Cedie Janson on his excellent sophomore full-length release, the river.

Following Janson’s 2021 debut release, Thoughts on the Top Floor and this year’s stitched together with magnetic tape EP, the river is an undisputed marvel. Underpinned by tape loops and distant echoes, Janson orchestrates something that swings back and forth from the dream-state and reality.

Guiding listeners into his world, the river starts with i (an introduction). The first of two songs featuring the director, photographer and spoken word artist, Dillon Howl, her ghostly vocal peels back the crucial layer that leads to wonderful new places. Which is exactly where we arrive with Another World. An abstract, piano-led piece that stirs and echoes across dark frontiers (“We stand waiting / Listening from some other world”).

Undulating (somewhere else) pulsates with the same energy. Feeling like a prescient take on Haruki Murakami’s new novel, The City and Its Uncertain Walls, the protagonist moves through vague space. It’s where a track like lovers thrives. Sparse minimalism that has its own way of binding this story together, but not before iv (so many things to ask you), which acts as a portal through to the next part of Janson’s world.

It’s where the river excels with the majesty of seven years and the river (a doorway) (ft. DEPUTY). Arguably the best one-two committed to tape this year, however both pieces feel like they form as one, leaving a deep, indelible mark on the soul.

“It takes a lot of strength to start again. And again,” sings Janson on the heartbeat of a fallen tree. Like two lovers, it’s the stitching together of abstract thoughts. On the latter, it’s perhaps the most deeply moving piece on the river, as two souls are spilt apart by the world’s ills (“I’ll meet you there in paradise”). It’s here where we arrive at new world. A shimmering dreamscape of possibilities into what that new world is. The answer? It can be anything you want it to be.

That’s the world Janson has built here. Astonishingly crafted, over the years there have been so many artists who have attempted to engineer a record like this, but none have come close to capturing the energy and emotional power of Cedie Janson’s the river.

Speaking via Zoom just after the release of the river from his Los Angeles base, it’s been almost ten years since Janson and I have seen one another. Having met in Brisbane through a mutual life-long friend many years ago, even during the embryonic stages of his creative endeavours, it’s not a surprise that Janson has reached this point. An artist with a vision and a fierce work ethic to match it, the river is the final result. Not only does it see Janson reaching the top of his creative arc, but in doing so, he’s carved out one of the year’s best releases.

Sun 13: To me, the river is the first record that embodies liminality through sound. Is that something you were thinking about when writing the album?

Cedie Janson: “Yes and no. I’m really glad that this is the feeling you took away from it. When I first started writing, it felt like more of a state of mind I was trying to access and create the album in, and then, as the process continues, I think then I was able to put these ideas or labels like liminality, and the subconscious mind on it, a little later down the line. 

“Looking back on it, it’s clear to me that I was pursuing these ideas from the very beginning, without realising it. For example, in a more practical sense, when I was first writing the album, I would write a piano song, and then I would do a variation of that piano song with tape loops and effects processing. Then when it came time to edit the album together, these songs would flow in and out of each other, somewhat like the river and like a subconscious state of mind, or a liminal space of not knowing… thoughts fading in and out of the listener’s conscious awareness. In hindsight, it’s obvious to see where these ideas had been taking me all along.

“From the get-go though, it was all about the process. The process informed the outcome and this idea of the subconscious and the liminal space, which has always been a feeling or space that I’ve been trying to explore. [I’ve] been fascinated by the human mind and these spaces that we find ourselves in. There’s a little bit of that on the last album but this has gone further down that pathway, for sure.”

S13: There feels like a real seclusion as well. You wrote the album away from Los Angeles, right? 

CJ: “Yeah, I had two trips to a secluded cabin in Washington State with my wife, and she was doing some writing at the time, so we both were in the writing zone. Nature, seclusion and introspection are definitely some of the themes I was exploring. Even when I was writing back in Los Angeles, I was still trying to get into that introspective mindset and write from that point of view. I did work with a few close collaborators on this album, but generally speaking it was a pretty isolated way of working.” 

S13: Talking about collaborations, Dillon Howl features again. How much of an input does she have on your work? 

CJ: “Dillon played a huge part on my first album, I even took the title from some of her poetry. This album was a little bit more personal, so I felt like I needed to explore these ideas a little more on my own. She has always been a great sounding board, when I have a lot of ideas floating around, and I’m trying to rein them all in, she’s fantastic at sculpting this chaos around me, and seeing the direction the project is headed in. Even though I do feel like she works in a very abstract or free-flowing way in how she writes, somehow it ties these loose ends into a greater concept.

“The introduction she provides for this album, I think is the perfect mix of this balance between a feeling of abstraction, while also setting the album up with a clear path forward. Coincidentally, we’ve been working on another project together, which is a much more balanced collaboration – I’m excited to hopefully get this work out in 2025.”

S13: Did you decide on the theme of the river before writing the music or did you have loops already in place beforehand?

CJ: “The concept of the river actually came to me in a blatantly literal way. The cabin we were staying in was right next to a beautiful river, and that was informing the work every day. The sound of the river was bleeding into my piano recordings, which I was recording directly to tape. We would go for hikes into nature on our writing breaks, exploring the area. But before arriving to this space I actually hadn’t written any music or loops, I started completely fresh. In terms of the tape loops, that’s something that I’ve been working with for many years but this project felt like the perfect time to reintroduce them into my work. What I love most is the accidental symbolism of the river in response to all of the ideas and concepts I was exploring in this work. When I eventually connected all of these dots, that’s when I could feel the synchronism of it all.” 

S13: That’s interesting, because I was going to ask about your immediate surroundings, and what you’re describing reminds me of Australia’s vast terrains. I don’t know whether that’s a subconscious thing as a fellow Australian and whether that bled into to what you were doing?

CJ: “Yes, possibly. I haven’t considered it until now. I grew up near the Great Barrier Reef. I think it’s generally a very collective human experience that when you’re near the water, you feel inspired by it. But especially given my upbringing, the ocean and the rivers were a huge part of my childhood, so there has to be something subconsciously in my mind when writing about it.

“I was reflecting on a lot of different parts of my life throughout the process of writing this. I would spend writing sessions where I would map out the different places that I’ve lived in growing up, and I would revisit different memories to encapsulate this idea of memories floating around us, some of them we can so easily lose track of. It’s easy to take memory for granted but I often wonder how many steps away we are from losing a memory as well. For me, nothing is more haunting than the times when I’m reminded of a pivotal memory that I could so easily have lost, and it just blows me away. The fragility of memory.”

S13: Do you remember what you were listening to when you were recording, and do you think that influenced the album? 

S13: “Yeah, I remember really clearly. In the early part of the process, we were on a road-trip, so we had plenty of time to listen to new music. I was listening to a lot of Low, the Weather Station and Damon Albarn’s solo album that he wrote on a piano in Iceland, Nick Cave’s Ghosteen. A lot of Harold Budd and William Basinski… every five years I have a new Mark Hollis or Talk Talk obsession and I was deep in one of those.

“I remember driving through forests in Oregon, then Washington… all of these mysterious green landscapes, with thick fog hovering constantly above. And it just suited this mood of very abstract songwriting and ambient, textural works. So yeah, that was generally what I was listening to before the first writing session, which almost certainly informed it.

“Aside from music, I was hypnotised by Jessica Beshir’s documentary Faya Dayi, in late 2021 I caught it at a screening in LA just before leaving for my first writing stint. There are a lot of William Basinski tracks synced too, which work so well to the film. Something about the hypnotic narrative of this documentary really stuck with me, and I think it was the spark of an idea for me to play with song-forms in this way. Then the themes of Barry Lopez’s book River Notes were also a huge inspiration – very natural but in kind of a surreal way and really painting the image of Pacific Northwest landscapes.”

S13: Undulating and seven years feel like real centrepieces to the album, but it got me thinking. Was this album written in sequence to how it’s presented?

CJ: “Almost. Very close. Both of my albums have turned out that way, actually.”

S13: I don’t think I’ve spoken to an artist that’s had that process, but listening closer to the river especially, I felt like it may have transpired that way. I can’t explain why, though…

CJ: “The lyrics were the last piece for me to write and they were written in different sequences but I wrote all the piano compositions and the tape loop compositions, and that was all sequential, almost to a tee without the exception of iv (so many things to ask you) – that was actually the last piece I wrote. [It] was not going to make it on the album, because I felt like I already had such a great closing track, and to me that felt like another closer. But I needed something after lovers to set a mood for an ending, and on cassette it would sit as the end of side A, so that works as the first ending… or the pause before seven years comes in, which feels like a new beginning.”

S13: The outlier is the heartbeat of a fallen tree, which has an avant-garde rock-based quality to it…

CJ: “Probably the more avant-garde and rock-based parts of that were done during the recording of the drums. But I always had written this dissonant piano ending to the song. For me, the song ends in an incredibly tumultuous way. I wanted to finish it with this atonal moment of pure, raw emotion. So when I took it into the studio with my friend Matt Deasy, I explained to him that I wanted to create a beat bordering on arrhythmic, which would add a level of uneasiness or chaos. I think it’s the most explosive moment on the album for sure.

“The very first sound that you hear in that song is actually the sound of a fallen tree in a river. When I was on a hike with my wife one day, we just heard this raw thumping, which was very strange to hear in a natural environment like this. To begin with we thought it might be the beginning of an earthquake. Then we realised what was happening was this tree that we were standing right next to had fallen in the river, and the tumultuous power of the river pushing against this tree was vibrating it, almost like a massive guitar string. It was creating this throbbing, pounding noise. Thankfully enough, I was doing field recordings at the time, and it was the perfect opportunity for me to then record that sound. I’ve manipulated it a little bit to really bring out that pounding quality in the recording.”

S13: One song that didn’t make it on the album is the Go-Betweens, Love Goes On. Was that a nice little nod to Brisbane? 

CJ: “Yeah, it was. It was a lot of different things. That’s the most recent piece that I’ve completed up until this point and it was always intended as a B-Side.

“I do remember that there was one day where I was feeling very insecure about the title of the track, lovers. I was wondering whether it was too broad of a title or cliché or whatever… as an artist, you have all these insecurities, at least I do. I was driving around one day with this on my mind, and the algorithm must have sensed this insecurity in me, [because] all of a sudden, Love Goes On came on. Grant McLennan was coming out of my car speakers, yelling lovers at me continuously, so I took that as a sign that I was on the right path.

“Of all of the things that could have reassured me in that particular moment, the fact that it was a band from Queensland, it felt like an important synchronicity. So when I was contemplating a cover to accompany the lovers single – it became an obvious choice.”

S13: Watching snippets of your live performance and it sounded great. Are house shows something that you think will become more prevalent?

CJ: “I think now more than ever, community is becoming an important part of how we move forwards from here. It’s a concept that I definitely would like to try and explore. Los Angeles has an interesting live environment, because it does feel like it’s a very industry-focused city. In terms of where experimental music fits in that sphere, that’s the greatest question of all. 

“There are a couple of cool venues that feel a little bit more DIY, but I think a lot of people are finding new ways to approach live music from a more DIY perspective as a result. For example, there are a number of ambient music shows happening in nature or churches. Similarly, I think house shows also are a way to build a music community outside of the traditional venue format.

“It was the perfect way to celebrate my album, to be honest, and I felt a closeness and community that is often so hard to come by in this city. It was two days before the election. I think it saved me. The warmth I felt coming away from that house show, taking that into the week was really important. Community is going to be really important for us moving forwards.”

The river is out now. Purchase from Bandcamp.