JOHN BUTCHER - tenor/soprano saxophones, (feedback tenor on # 4)

In the summer of 2022 Thomas Buhl-Wiggers, of the Cejero festival and label, kindly invited me to play inside the mammoth Brønshøj water tower.

The very resonant spaces I’ve worked in before include a giant gasometer, a hollowed-out Japanese mountain, an underground reservoir, a Victorian mausoleum and a massive World War II oil tank.
I’m still fascinated by how different these enormous environments all sounded and felt. They each inspired different approaches in trying to find the music for the actual space, and my recent experience within this extraordinary construction was no exception.

The Brønshøj Vandtårn is a concrete water-tower, built almost a hundred years ago in the suburbs of Copenhagen. It’s 20m wide and 34m high - smaller than some similar shapes I’ve played in, but with a large, lingering reverberation. Some sounds seem to float away as if through liquid, others acquire a shifting haze, and some just prefer to sit around.
John Butcher