Michael Johnson arrived in Philadelphia a swamp-ape from panhandle Florida to lead music technology studies at a downtown arts university there. Instead he discovered in its hallowed halls the derelict crown jewel of archaic analog electronics with which he would weave his image of the Ape School.
Armed with the Moog Modular synthesizer he helped revive – just the fourth born and installed by the hands of Robert Moog 40 years earlier in 1965 – Michael set about conjuring to record original songs from beyond his prior tenures in Kurt Heasley’s Lilys, and Sub Pop’s Holopaw. Michael used the Modular to weave lush motorik dreamsound throughout dynamic instrumentation and his distinct croon.
This second one-man-does-all album by Michael Johnson – the first to use the animistic moniker – marries primitive songs with incorporeal sound: glamatic pop explorations, navigated by studio light, coalesced over time, wine, fallouts, and Rundgren-style self-control.
From the resounding onset of “Wail to God, to the song’s oscillator outgoing barely two minutes later, the tonal breadth and sonic fluidity of Ape School is clear. A song like “Did What I Did” flirts with pop sensibility, but coheres in subtle feedback before repetition would normally devolve it to redundance.
Elsewhere, as on “My Intention” and “Deathstomp”, Michael commits to full mechanical shredding, focused romps of analog rock glory, awash in system buzz. Other more spacious moments like “That’s OK”, “It’s Over” and “The Underground” reveal the songs’ subtle instrumental basis, and bare the accidentally clever, eloquent lyrics of his elastic tenor.
Mixed in Jamaican Brooklyn with Michael Pecchio in a bath of reverb, delay, tape echo, smoke, mirrors, orange juice and cayenne pepper, Ape School has finally congealed. Taut song studies written each in a day took the entire 21st century thus far to come together. An album initially intended for release by co-conspirator Alfred “Daedelus” Darlington has found a home at Ninja Tune’s Counter Records, upon graduation from Primate U.
With a band of student human musicians rescued from the confines of musical education, Ape School has opened its doors to limited faculty enrollment. Composed of previous cohorts in Lilys, Holopaw, Human Television, and beyond, the live Ape School incarnation takes one monkey’s primordial creations on summer vacation to civilization. Evidently basted nightly.
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