Review
Genre and Mood
Kruder & Dorfmeister’s “Johnson” is trip-hop and downtempo at their most patient: hypnotic in its repetition, melancholic in its slowed blues voice and a little mysterious, like a message found in a drawer twenty-five years after it was written.
Song Summary
The track is named after its sample. Kruder & Dorfmeister took a line from Robert Johnson’s “Sweet Home Chicago” and slowed it down. ORF.at describes the whole recipe: a filtered and repeated blues sample, an atmospheric chord and drums that enter late; nothing more is needed, it writes, to open the time capsule. Johnson came out as a single in August 2020 and opens 1995, an album the duo recorded in the mid-1990s and never finished.
Musical Breakdown
The sources describe the track’s elements and the order in which they arrive rather than its timings, so this walk-through follows them.
Opening
The slowed, filtered Johnson line repeats with an atmospheric chord beside it, and for a while that is all there is.
The Drums Arrive
The drums come in late. A Closer Listen hears loping beats and a vocal sample that plunge the listener back into an era when Bristol was surging with excitement.
The Loop
From there the track lives on repetition, the sample, the chord and the beat turning over and over.
Concepts in Focus
Johnson is a lesson in sampling with limits. The duo told ORF.at that their studio in Vienna’s Grundsteingasse ran on an Atari computer and an AKAI S1100 sampler, which could record only 16 seconds, the basis of a whole song. A few words of the blues had to be enough.
Those seconds become a loop; ORF.at calls the duo’s relationship to loops almost obsessive and links it to that equipment and its dubby filters. Compare Camel Power Club – Ourson, which builds a gentler track on Son House’s voice.
The music video, produced by HØVN films and directed by Oscar and Stefan Pecher, sets the track in an abandoned house whose inhabitants move under the spell of a futuristic VR device.
Artistic Context
Peter Kruder and Richard Dorfmeister became famous for their downtempo remixes after the G-Stoned EP of 1993. Their own album was shelved when The K&D Sessions took them on world tours. After finding the DATs, they chose to edit and master the tracks rather than rebuild them, to keep, as they put it, the pure K&D time of 1993 to 1995. G-Stone Recordings released 1995 in November 2020.
Impact and Reception
ORF.at found the album unmistakably Kruder & Dorfmeister and aged without aesthetic loss, wrapped in the euphoric melancholy that became the feel of the Vienna sound. Start here, then let the whole of 1995 play.
