(2022) J.R. Bohannon - Compulsions  


Review:
If you already dealt with mental health issues, the pandemic has probably done you no favors. For Kentucky-born, Brooklyn-based guitarist J.R. Bohannon, the stress and disruption of being a musician living in one of the nation’s early COVID hotspots aggravated the panic attacks that he already experienced as a result of obsessive-compulsive disorder. Compulsions documents one way he got through them — by picking up his guitars. Bohannon’s work, both under his own name and with the ambient project Ancient Ocean, typically has not foregrounded agitation, and there’s not a moment on this album’s nine tracks where calm seems far away. Classical and Brazilian influences inform his phrasing and rhythms imparting stillness and sway in equal measures. Just hearing the unhurried pace and delicate phrasing of his nylon-stringed acoustic guitar on “Monument” could dial down a listener’s blood pressure. “Equal Lines” and “Repetition is a Form of Freedom” sound like invitations to just take a seat and savor the slow-moving air that hangs suspended between one plucked note and the next. But consider the pacing of the opening track, “Our Only World.” Slow strums with a hint of dissonance yields to a pastoral finger-picking pattern, which gives way in turn to a slow, winding pedal steel melody. No one passage betrays apprehension, but none of them needed to end as soon as they did, either. One could read each of the music’s shifts as a moment when disquiet forced the guitarist’s hand, only for him to push back. And on “Love in Action,” a nervously jigging guitar first elbows aside some plush synthesizer swells, and then comes perilously close to tripping over its own intricacies. This tape’s (yes, the album’s physical manifestation is the same format that used to clutter the cash-wraps of New Age bookstores) moments of unrest do not joust with those of calm. Rather, Bohannon’s music contains them both, acknowledging that movement through one will sooner or later lead to an encounter with the other.


       


Track List:
01 - Our Only World
02 - Clarity of Confusion
03 - Monuments
04 - Plum Village
05 - For Marc
06 - Equal Lines
07 - Repetition Is a Form of Freedom
08 - Love in Action
09 - Intention


Media Report:
Genre: alternative folk
Country: USA
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec, 16-bit PCM
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits


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