The pedal steel guitar, a staple of country music, is inexorably associated with one of the instrument’s most alluring qualities: its ability, within the confines of a pop song lasting just a few minutes, to conjure the open skies and endless spaces so crucial to the mythology of the American West. If you’re going to claim the pedal steel as your primary instrument, especially in ambient music, you’re faced with the choice either to lean into those associations or resist them. On his new studio album , unapologetically chooses the latter.
This is the most restless, exploratory album thus far from the Oakland guitarist, who started out on acoustic before giving steel the starring role on 2017’s A lot of ambient artists are embracing the pedal steel right now, from the contemplative West Coast duo to the explicitly countrified , but none are quite as willing to jettison the instrument’s readymade associations as Johnson. He has more in common with the ambient techno stalwart (aka ), who used a lap steel to kick up clouds of shoegaze dust. The range of Johnson’s vision is most apparent on the two absolutely titanic tracks that bookend “Teleos” at first sounds like nondescript pedalboard soup until it gradually assembles itself into a six-note riff.
Then the real surprise: Drummer Ryan Jewell enters with a massive fill, elevating the song into the kind of uplifting post-rock that’s often associated with sports and athletics—recall ’s , the 2010 with ’s “.