Dont Look Back

Dont Look Back, composer Jenny Olivia Johnson’s solo debut album, explores the subject of early childhood and adolescent trauma. The album’s five musical works—scored for voice, small chamber ensemble, and electronic sounds—profile characters who undergo the emotional aftermath of extreme experiences. Traumatic memories can be impossible to adequately describe, account for, or narrate, and that is what propels the often non-linear stories being told here. Ranging from abstract re-imaginings of the 1972 Andes plane disaster (“Pilot”) and a near-drowning incident occurring in Southern California in 1996 (“Dollar Beers”), to a poetic reading of Nabokov’s Lolita from the point of view of traumatized 13-year-old Humbert Humbert (“Starling”), an emotional homage to a Metallica-loving, self-injuring teen from the 1980s MTV era (“Cutter”), and a fragmentary opera-in-progress about the mysterious suicide of a college freshman (“The After Time”), Dont Look Backeschews straightforward narratives in favor of haunting, temporally protracted meditations on the sometimes destructive, sometimes beautiful traces of fragmentary memories that survivors of early trauma retain.

Many of these musical narratives of trauma emerge out of language--as sensations, colors, or sounds, and sometimes as synaesthetic (mixed-sensory) perceptions. It is precisely these kinds of complex and unknowable aspects of human memory that Jenny Olivia Johnson explores not only in music, but also in her work as a scholar of memory and its relationship to sound. Every piece on Dont Look Back—which is both a cycle of disparate oratorios telling different kinds of stories, and a deeply personal mixtape tracing the last five years of the composer’s own life—is haunted by distant memories of things that may or may not have actually happened, and the mysteries behind that process.

While these subject matters might seem dark, “Dont Look Back” acknowledges what it means to overcome darkness, and how difficult experiences can indelibly reshape one's perceptual abilities in eerily beautiful ways. The honesty with which traumatic experiences are depicted here promises to touch many, even those for whom this genre and style of music might be entirely foreign.

Jenny Olivia Johnson is a composer and sound artist currently teaching at Wellesley College. Her music, which has been described as “gorgeous, ominous, and hypnotic” by the Boston Globe, “stunning in its simplicity and power” by the Boston Musical Intelligencer, “bold” by the Los Angeles Times, and “iridescent, shimmering, and evocative” by Time Out New York, is often concerned with abstract representations of overwhelming emotional experiences. Her scholarly work on synaesthesia, musical memory, and trauma has been published in Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture and the Transcultural Music Review, and a recent sound installation, “Glass Heart,” is scheduled for exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in 2017, as part of the “One Life” series profiling Sylvia Plath (curated by Dorothy Moss). Jenny divides her time between Cambridge, MA and New York, NY.