> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.hwaelmag.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Jason Dungan & Johan Carøe :: Routine - URL: https://www.hwaelmag.com/jason-dungan-johan-caroe-routine/ - Published: 2026-09-22T01:41:06.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-22T01:41:06.000Z - Description: Ambient folk, zither, cello, tape and interrupted time - Author: Hwael Mag - Tags: Album Reviews, 2026, Experimental, Electronica, Ambient Folk, Post-Classical ### Routine took more than two years to become ten tracks. Perhaps that is also why almost nothing in it seems particularly interested in arriving on time. --- Jason Dungan and Johan Carøe made *Routine* without really behaving like two people making a record. The pieces passed from one to the other between 2023 and 2025, between Copenhagen and rural Sweden, and then simply sat there. Sometimes for weeks, sometimes for months. Work, grief, children, days that end too soon: the answer arrived when it could. Carøe has spoken of improvisation with stretched time. It is a definition that holds up better than most labels. “Clouds” brings together zither, clarinet, a bass figure and the slightly clumsy gait of a groovebox. The zither, by now central to Dungan’s work as Blue Lake, works here in a lower register. The percussion is elementary, far more present in the mix than one would expect: a small loop, part rhythm and part one of those games repeated long enough to become a memory. [Routine by Jason Dungan / Johan Carøe](https://jasondungan-johancaroe.bandcamp.com/album/routine?ref=hwaelmag.com) “Hymn” pushes forward phrases of treated cello that little by little lose their wooden body. Then the zither enters, somewhere between resonance and pattern. Arthur Russell comes to mind almost at once, a reference the record openly acknowledges, above all for the way the gesture stays recognizable even after being manipulated. “Mornings with Rita” is less guarded. DX7, small drum machines, flute and violin draw close, as if the singer meant for the track had called at the last moment to say they would not be coming. There is a kind of good humour to it, even as the arrangement keeps leaving gaps that a more disciplined pop record would probably have filled in. Guitar and synth move in short, easy-to-follow phrases. For a few minutes *Routine* stops asking so much of the ear and simply carries itself along. The title track sounds calm, while still letting the underlying work show through. The cello rises and falls; the bass clarinet darkens whatever passes near it. The electronics leave small smudges where everything could be cleaner. It happens often on the record: at first everything seems to be in its place; then, listening closer, you can still make out the fingerprints of whoever put everything there. LISTENING NOTES / 01 01 02 03 “Clouds” Zither in a lower register, with a small groovebox loop that sits somewhere between rhythm and repetition remembered. “Mornings with Rita” DX7, drum machines, flute and violin leave gaps that a more disciplined pop arrangement would probably have filled. “Routine” Cello rises and falls; bass clarinet darkens the space; electronics leave small smudges where the surface could have been cleaner. At some point *Routine* simply starts to cohere. Folk, art pop, ambient, post-classical: the words are all there, if needed, but the record, sure of its means, moves through them with a certain indifference. The biography, if you let it, is strong enough to swallow the whole record. Carøe lost his father and became a father while the album was taking shape; some of Dungan’s recordings were being manipulated during his newborn son’s naps. Dungan found other moments, other hours, for zither, melodica, acoustic guitar. This story stays inside the record in a way that is more practical than symbolic. It can be heard in the stolen time, in the interruptions, in the materials left there until someone could get back to them. > **A recording could wait long enough to meet, on the other side, someone who had in the meantime already become slightly different.** “Silence” comes close to meditation. The stringed instruments, and the way they are played, can suggest something remote, even archaic, even though the writing is clearly contemporary. “Reunion” shifts Dungan’s zither toward a more classical articulation; organ, Moog and Anna Caroline Olesen’s mezzo-soprano voice open up the space considerably, and the track ends up close to post-classical. Here Arthur Russell, Les Disques du Crépuscule and a certain strand of avant-garde pop from the late Seventies and early Eighties stop, for a moment, being names in a press kit. For more than forty minutes, habits are interrupted, resumed, diverted. A phrase recorded in one season can receive its answer once almost everything around it has already changed. Dungan and Carøe end up playing with earlier versions of themselves too, kept in the files they keep passing back and forth. In the end the title stays there, less an explanation than a working condition: going back to the same things, after weeks or months, and realising that in the meantime something is no longer where it was. *Routine* stays within a very precise vocabulary — zither, treated strings, small synthesizers, minimalism, art pop left a little open — without ever seeming compelled to prove it. One can feel how considered it is, and yet it plays through from beginning to end with remarkable ease. At no point does the method get in the way of the pleasure of staying inside those sounds. ---