Chris Johnston

Fiction Writer at Freelance

nonfiction || music || ⚽️ || Melbourne https://t.co/ndkIBhygQG https://t.co/pcVMoF8h9S

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Articles

e4444e’s ‘Authentic Natural Tradition’

1 week ago | themonthly.com.au | Chris Johnston

The codified e4444e shortens himself to e4 for brevity but in real life he is Romy Church, a phenomenally talented young musician from Newcastle/Awabakal. He started releasing very independent, very DIY music 10 years ago with Edgar, seven tracks of homemade beats and noise, the sound of an emerging artist making basic marks with basic tools. A lot has changed – some things have not, but a lot has.
Wilson Tanner’s Legends is an instrumental ode to the earth

3 weeks ago | thesaturdaypaper.com.au | Chris Johnston

The Australian instrumental music duo Wilson Tanner have a specific way of working that – in my words, not theirs – is about going outside and letting nature intervene: making the music in the outside and also of the outside. The duo have followed the dictum for three very fine albums over nine years – 69 (2016), II (2019) and now Legends. Their debut, 69, was recorded in a Perth backyard.
Jazz musician Shabaka Hutchings on the power of restraint

Feb 28, 2025 | thesaturdaypaper.com.au | Chris Johnston

In the final weeks of 2023, the celebrated British jazz musician Shabaka Hutchings put down his saxophone after a live show playing John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme with four drummers at a heritage church in Hackney, London. He knew it was a goodbye. He used the sax just once more over Christmas, to finish parts of the astonishing Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace, the second album under his own name, released last year.
Horsegirl’s ‘Phonetics On and On’

Jan 30, 2025 | themonthly.com.au | Chris Johnston |Paul Barry |Margaret Simons |Louise Milligan

The Chicago indie trio’s new album of infectious weird pop unaffectedly wears its ’80s and ’90s influences on it sleeve Horsegirl is a three-piece indie band from Chicago that formed in 2019 when they were just kids, around 17. A high-school band. It all grew pretty quickly, as history dictates when cool young things with a familiar, super-catchy sound and the right backers start getting written about.
Before and after ambience: ‘The Head as Form’d in the Crier’s Choir’ and ‘Endlessness’

Oct 30, 2024 | themonthly.com.au | Chris Johnston |Don Watson |Anna Krien |Jason Koutsoukis

Sarah Davachi is a storied composer and musician from Canada exploring classical and chamber music, and the art of the ambient synthesiser drone, in extraordinary ways and in amazing spaces. Pipe organs in churches are her thing: she abstracts, retunes and reinvents them in her recordings and residencies. There is a certain gravity she brings to her recorded music – 12 albums or doubles since 2015.
Dirty Three return with Love Changes Everything

Jun 18, 2024 | thesaturdaypaper.com.au | Chris Johnston

Love Changes Everything is Dirty Three’s new studio album, the first from the Australian trio in 12 years. Out this month, it consists of six songs/compositions/outré jams titled “Love Changes Everything”, from “I” to “VI”. The record has no words, no literal indicators – just 40 minutes of extraordinary musical freefall. I say “freefall” because there’s no tether attaching the band to what we might call rock music, no line between Dirty Three and convention.
The Mojave Desert in a Mustang

May 10, 2024 | thesaturdaypaper.com.au | Chris Johnston

We get in at night from Los Angeles in a black Ford Mustang with a deep rumbling undercarriage and enough thrust to throw us back in our heated seats. All those roadside taco vans on the way out of the city, along the underside of the San Bernardino National Forest heading east, passed by in a blur of colour. Dusk, then dark, in California. The cold sets in quickly in the spring.
Three overlooked albums of spiritual jazz from 2023

Dec 20, 2023 | themonthly.com.au | Chris Johnston

The new music I liked most this year came from the north of England. This was not surprising, given this has been the case for me, more or less, through the 1980s and 1990s and retrospectively the two decades prior. For the musically fevered region around Manchester, Leeds, Liverpool and Sheffield, it’s a case of pick your band, pick your producer, pick your genre. And the pickings are rich.
The unsung career of Margret RoadKnight

Nov 22, 2023 | themonthly.com.au | Chris Johnston

Margret RoadKnight is a gem. A rough diamond, perhaps. She is plain-speaking and extremely direct, with a flash of wonderful pink in her long, straw-coloured hair. “Eighty years old,” she says, “60 years of performing music this year and 50 years since my first album.” But the veteran singer of jazz, blues, folk, gospel and traditional music – whose career has been largely unsung in mainstream Australian culture –is now wondering whether it might be time to slow down.
Flames prospect Topi RĂ¶nni faces criminal charge in Finland for incident from 2021: Source

Oct 19, 2023 | bvmsports.com | Chris Johnston

By Chris Johnston and The Athletic Staff via The Athletic, Calgary Flames prospect Topi Rönni faces a criminal charge stemming from an incident that occurred in the summer of 2021, a league source confirmed to The Athletic. The incident occurred when Rönni was a minor, and charges weren't filed until July 2023, according to the source. The police report on the incident has been sealed and a date for the... Read more on Publisher's website