Name: Jonas Howden Sjøvaag
Nationality: Norwegian
Occupation: Drummer, composer, improviser
Current event: Jonas Howden Sjøvaag's new album Spirit of Rain is out via Sphiwreckords.

If you enjoyed this Jonas Howden Sjøvaag interview and would like to know more about his music, visit his official homepage. He is also on Instagram, and Facebook.



How do listening with headphones and listening through a stereo system change your experience of sound and music?

This question taps into lots of possible trains of thought, and I do listen to music a lot in both ways. Starting with the headphones, there are many price points and levels of quality, but most importantly, I think, is to identify what set works best for a specific application.

I have quite a few sets available myself, ranging from standards like the Beyer DT770, Sony MDR7506 and Sennheiser HD650 that I use for personal monitoring when I record. Then there’s stuff aimed more for travel, and thus what I use for everyday listening, specifically this is the Sony WH-1000XM5 nowadays. I used to have the XM4 before, and some Bose plugs before that, and when I need to check masters I’ve made, or get another way of listening to them, I go to my Sennheiser HD800S.

All of the mentioned above sets work very well, but they do something to my experience of what they play back to me, not only in terms of sound quality, but in ease of use, the physical space they occupy, the feeling of wearing them, etc etc.

The same thing can be said about stereo speaker systems. Some are cheap, some are extremely expensive. I have one set of Focal SM9s for mastering and mixing, ie working with music professionally, and I have two more sets for listening. One is a clean new Genelec set, and another is a much older Tandberg stereo system that I use for pure pleasure. At home I have the Teenage Engineering OD-11, which are cube shaped speakers to be placed on the floor. These are based on a design from the 1970’s, and are supposed to spread the sound more evenly in a room, avoiding the traditional ideal listening position that most stereo systems aim for.

Further, there’s the room itself. The more expensive and “good” the gear gets, the more demand it places on the room they are being used in. The list just goes on and on, and I guess we all know people that will start listening to music where a presumed audiophile quality is more important than the music being played. Which, of course, means you are no longer listening to music, you are listening to a frequency spectrum that you measure against an ideal, and the goal is no longer to enjoy music but to experience a spectrum as close to the ideal as possible.

Anyways, I wrote this to give a little weight to what I consider important, and for me that all comes down to whether I’m moved by the music being played or not. The system it’s played on doesn’t really matter that much, because as with the kind of headsets or speaker pairs, most items will work if they are suitable for the application.

That being said, I’m not claiming that audio quality doesn’t matter. A while back I was in the studio listening to a record by Art Pepper titled Art Pepper meets the rhythm section, which was recorded by Roy DuNann and released on Contemporary Records in 1957.



I listened on my Tandberg system, and the music filled the room, the presence of everything was like it should be, and as the recording was done by a guy who most likely is one of the most ingenious engineers of all time, I got a very clear sense of the instruments in the band, the placements in the room (weirdly, as on playback, all but the soloist is placed in the left channel, and Art Pepper is alone in the right), and in fact also the very room itself.

It was a very nice evening in the studio listening to that record, but I also do listen to it on my Bluetooth headset, when on a plane, for instance, and I like the record then too. It’s not the same, but neither is the circumstance or possibilities of listening.

It always comes down to the album. If it’s good I’ll listen to it on any system available, because the music itself has importance. If it does not appeal to me it doesn’t help if the system is immersive, offers supreme clarity, warmth whatever technical forte is offered; it will be uninteresting anyway.

But, to answer the question more precisely: the change is in the space the music is given. I never listen through headphones if I have the option of listening on speakers, that extra dimension given by music bouncing off the walls around you makes the entire experience a little more relaxed and pleasurable, I find.

Tell me about some of the albums or artists that you love specifically for their sound, please.

There are many, but as mentioned, everything I’ve heard recorded by Roy DuNann sounds exceptional. It has everything a good recording needs to have and was done using a minimal amount of technical masking between the performance in the studio and the playback in my room.

This is of course acoustic jazz music, and in that genre it’s impossible not to mention a boatload of ECM recordings. For me the most important ones, or the artists I have listened to the most, are Keith Jarret, Jan Garbarek, Pat Metheny & Kenny Wheeler.

I like the sound there too, but sound quality isn’t really a fixed thing, it moves and shifts, and it gets stale at some point, if everyone does the same thing for too long. An example of which is a trio record from the Norwegian pianist Erlend Skomsvoll, released this year (Noshk Blues), recorded on an upright piano, as opposed to a grand piano, and the sound just stood out immediately when I put it on.



The effect was one I shared with many other musicians I’ve talked too as well; that sound, though not “as good” or “as perfect” as the ECM-ideal I mentioned before, was a contrast to the current, and because it was done and implemented very well (by the engineer Ingar Hunskaar, btw), it has an impact because it is a contrast, or just another audible wrapper for a musical expression.

This further led me to Larry Goldings' Music from the front room, similarly recorded on an upright, in a recording session that took this idea even further (I think), which landed me nicely back at Roy DuNann, closing that loop, at least for now.



On another planet there are musicians operating within the electronic and the pop and rock genres, and I like those too, obviously. I especially love Thom Yorke’s solo album, The Eraser, produced by Nigel Goodrich …



… but I equally like the sound of The Smile’s album Wall of Eyes, although I get some of the same feeling as with ECM stuff. There’s a way to do it, and it’s superb and great sounding, but I’ve heard it a bit too much, maybe. I think this is why Wall of Eyes didn’t get a lot of play time here, it’s a great album and everything is good, but I’m a bit full of that kind of sound at the moment.



I also like almost everything by Richie Hawtin, and Nathan Fake’s Hard Islands sounds good.



[Read our Richie Hawtin interview]

“Owl Song” by Ambrose Akinmusire is high up on the list.



Bill Frisell’s Guitar in the Space Age is amazing, especially the drums (and even more especially the bass drum).



Then Tom Waits. Everything is great there, same with Martha Wainwright’s albums and performances.

In general, I like productions that are focused on the delivery of the intended emotional content, and I am not that interested in productions that try to get to that ideal I have mentioned many times already. Additionally, I listen to music all the time, so this is just what I came to think of right now.

Do you experience strong emotional responses towards certain sounds? If so, what kind of sounds are these and do you have an explanation about the reasons for these responses?

Yes, I do, and I think all human beings do, too. Practitioners of musical therapy use this specifically, so, it’s not possible to say that one does not have an emotional response towards certain sounds. It’s what film music composers utilize too, the fact that we react in a certain way, to certain sounds.

Having said that, I’m not sure which level we’re on. Strong can mean so many things. Do I have to cry, before reaching the level of strong, or is it enough for the music to cause a stir, or a felt “something” withing the body? In any case, both of the above have happened, under different circumstances, but rarely tied to one specific sound. It’s more the movement or evolvement of a sound, or harmonic progression, that does it to me.

Or melody. Listening to Keith Jarrett play “Over the Rainbow” on solo piano in a concert hall in Tokyo, for instance, certainly has a vibe to it.



So does the recording of the sound of a black hole that was published a while back. In that case most people reported hearing something like dead souls calling out for help or to frighten, a really really bad sounding thing. Scary, actually, in itself.

So to answer the last part of this question, that kind of response is probably something that is hardwired in us, the system that gathers and interprets our surroundings to help us make decisions that make sense.

Being moved by Keith, or any other melody, is different. I would guess that it’s much more tied to the palimpsest structure of our minds, where the element in question triggers a jumble of past memories, feelings and other emotional responses that are buried in us and accumulated over the years of our own existence.