Chuck Johnson's Balsams and The Missing Link of Ambient Pedal Steel
When does pedal steel stop sounding "country?"
From the Chuck Johnson Bandcamp page:
“Balsams is a record that lives outside genre and time, one that continues to develop with each successive deep listen.”
Writing about music is but a series of Gordian knots—hours at the computer continue to advance as the puzzle of describing sounds with words seems to become ever more futile. The solution is as clever as it is bathetic—the simple act of publication, akin to the acerbic slash of Alexander’s sword, renders the enigma moot. But, as a description of ambient music, the above quote still retains some vestigial knots to be undone.
Let’s not kid ourselves here—Balsams is not some Platonic ideal nor Husserlian epoché as the quote would like us to believe. It does not live outside genre and time and does not require a “deep listen” for commensurately deep enjoyment. “Living outside time and space” is a sort of passé attitude towards ambience that seemed to have peaked around the 90s’—albums like Ambient Otaku (1994) and Selected Ambient Works Volume II (1994) soothed listeners with an indistinct soup of synthesizers that was less transportive than it was sedative. This approach, fortunately, is but a single strain of the ambient genome. Even during the 90s’ albums like the KLF’s Chill Out (1990) and The Orb’s Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld (1994) offered alternative experiences of ambience. The latter’s music is more geographically specific in its use of “found sound” field recordings, more eclectic in style, and much more focused on networks of distinct sounds (with concomitant histories) rather than some congealed sonic mass that lies above and beyond our sordid human lives.
Johnson seems, like many of his contemporaries, to be interested in these distinct personalities of sound, or rather a single distinct personality: the pedal steel guitar. Much like those Silurian anachronisms mudskippers, the pedal steel can never stray too far from its musical waters. Decades of association with country music has molded it into a calling card for the genre and, as such, the instrument has been forced to flounder on the liminal shoreline, tepidly exploring other styles while all the while still yoked to the genre that made it famous.
I can confidently say Johnson’s pedal steel has grown legs. Balsams is a scientific illustration of the Missing Link of pedal steel playing, a creature capable of making the permanent leap from the country music pond onto uncharted musical land. It’s an entirely new genus of ambient-country fusion, a splicing of genes that’s been attempted since Daniel Lanois lent his pedal steel croons to Brian Eno’s Apollo (1983), followed up by the KLF’s Chill Out (1990) and, most recently, Luke Schneider’s Altar of Harmony (2020).
To be fair, Lanois was playing a different game then. The final frontier of space resonated so gracefully with the pedal steel’s oh-so-lonesome air that what was initiated was not the pedal steel per se but what it symbolized—the American frontier as ontologically similar to the final frontier of space. Similarly, Chill Out’s “Madrugasa Eterna” and “Elvis on the Radio, Steel Guitar in my Soul” positively leaned into the country music connotations of the pedal steel, in particularly the cultural imaginations of the South as its paired with recordings of Elvis, American radio broadcasts, and an evangelist’s sermon.
Some of you may be blinking furiously at the phrase “pedal steel per se,” and you would be correct in doing so. I’m not attempting to locate some transcendental truth of pedal steel playing (which goes against the point of this essay), but instead am attempting to find the pivot point of connotation in sound. To put it inquisitively—when does the pedal steel stop sounding “country” and begin to form new connotations?
Altar of Harmony is one answer to this question. In accordance with the phrase “living outside genre and time,” its production obliterates any identifiable source of the sound as it transforms into a wash of distortion ornamented by new age synths. What results is not evolution, but extinction of the pedal steel. A successful mutation must retain some (admittedly arbitrary) core “identity” of the species or it runs the risk of becoming something else entirely; Altar of Harmony is, to quote his Bandcamp page, “a total reinvention of an iconic instrument,” but in committing to this innovation Schneider loses the pedal steel’s iconic qualities that make it identifiable as said instrument.
The amphibious Balsams straddles these two approaches as an inchoate tetrapod straddles its homely waters and the unexplored terrestrial land. It retains the instrument’s inimical sound while reconfiguring it within new sonic contexts, a process very much implicated in genre and time. The iconic pitch slides of the pedal steel shine brilliantly on the record, but still feel indebted to the imaginations of the American countryside, however distant. Unlike the previous two contrasting examples, Balsams is not afflicted by tunnel vision in the wake of such an outsized history, either in tenaciously yoking itself to it or in being blinded by the manifold possibilities of its freedom from it. A pathetic farewell swells up from its croons, a sound that bears the fading scars of a past life as well as the hopeful vigor of a new dawn.