Externally, it’s white. Inside, it’s white. And yet the minimalist packaging of Tom Johnson’s ‘Orgelpark Color Chart’ is produced using heavyweight textured card. Within the grain, the weave of the texture, are tiny shadows, different shades, the light reflecting and refracting in myriad directions. There is no single shade of white.
Similarly, the music – so many tiny, fine intricacies within a single note (C, played across seven octaves), long, ringing tones that teeter and shake like a wet finger circling the rim of a wine glass – may on the surface appear to be the sonic equivalent of a blank canvas, but as the cover reminds us, everything lies in the minutest of details, and over the course of the album’s fifty-minutes – a single, continuous track – the listener slowly becomes aware of the nuances, the subtle shifts, the multitonalities that exist within that single note. It’s anything but uniform or unchanging.
The sounds are, in fact, organs: four of them, and the booklet contains a full catalogue of the positions of all of the stop-knobs for each row across all four of them. It’s a remarkably precise work, and it’s perhaps difficult to fully appreciate its intricacies and details.
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So cast aside thoughts of the colour for a moment, and consider the shape: an infinitely flexible, ever-shifting multifaceted figure of limitless dimensions in perpetual motion. No one side is longer than, or equal to, the others. It occupies no space; it occupies all space. Its edges are smooth and clean and sharp, cut like a diamond.
‘Orgelpark Color Chart’ is an album to mediate to, to be drawn in by, that creates a unique and transient space that’s not static, even for a moment.
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