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# The Music Stays Where It Is, Jason Dungan and Johan Carøe on Routine
- URL: https://www.hwaelmag.com/the-music-stays-where-it-is-jason-dungan-and-johan-caroe-on-routine/
- Published: 2026-10-08T22:19:13.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-08T22:38:18.000Z
- Description: Made in naptimes: Dungan and Carøe on Routine, Rita and a zither.
- Author: Hwael Mag
- Tags: Interviews, 2026, Experimental, Ambient Folk

###   
Before the record there was a cello recorded in a flat while a birth was awaited, a broken zither from a Copenhagen flea market, a pump organ facing a field of cows, and a puppy called Rita.

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Almost every account of [Routine](https://www.hwaelmag.com/jason-dungan-johan-caroe-routine/) begins at Andersabo, the cabin in the Swedish countryside where Jason Dungan has run a residency since 2016, and where Johan Carøe arrived to work with Sofie Birch. The record itself began elsewhere, in a Copenhagen apartment, in the weeks when Carøe and his partner were waiting for their daughter to be born. There he recorded the first layer: cello movements full of open strings, odd measures and patterns that fold back on themselves, while Dungan's Stikling, given to him as a gift for the coming child, played through those days. A handful of fragments then travelled to Dungan by email, two musicians living in the same city who chose to speak to each other through files.

  
The two arrive from different lineages. Dungan grew up in Dallas and moved between Europe and the United States following the postings of a geologist father; he named Blue Lake after Don Cherry's 1974 live album, and began building his own zithers once the old Swedish one he had found at a flea market proved too worn to play, spacing the strings and adding bridges so that both hands could play. Sun Arcs earned him Pitchfork's Best New Music in 2023\. Carøe trained as a film composer, co-wrote the score for Gold Coast with Angelo Badalamenti and the one for Miss Osaka with Yasuaki Shimizu, and shared a Danish critics' nomination with Birch for Repair Techniques. His private canon is Arthur Russell, to whom he keeps returning, and the Bedroom Community records of Nico Muhly, Nadia Sirota and Sam Amidon.

  
The method grew out of the hours domestic life left free: a daughter's naptimes, late nights, the dark early mornings before Danish schools open. Over several years the tracks went back and forth until they settled, built almost entirely from first takes and edited afterwards to leave room and air. Carøe calls it improvisation with time stretched. Zither and cello sit beside a DX7, a Juno, a TR6 drum machine and tape echo, and for the two men who made them the ten instrumental pieces carry precise timestamps: a synth recorded during a nap in 2023, a cello played in his in-laws' bedroom in Jutland when the baby had just been born. Routine was released by Tonal Union on 25 September.

  
This is where the interview that follows begins: with a puppy named Rita, and then with the sounds themselves, the zither and what it still refuses to do, what writing for film leaves in a composer's hands, the gifts of interruption, the rooms and records that were truly present while the album took shape, the meaning of its title, and the last song that changed the way each of them works.

[Routine by Jason Dungan / Johan Carøe](https://jasondungan-johancaroe.bandcamp.com/album/routine?ref=hwaelmag.com) 

THE CONVERSATION  
Jason Dungan & Johan Carøe / 30 September 2026

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### Q / 01

*"Mornings with Rita" sounds like a song waiting for a singer who never turned up. Did you ever imagine a particular voice for it, or for any other track on the record? And who is Rita?*

**Jason:** The funny thing is that Rita is literally a puppy – our dog had puppies and I was having some sleepless nights taking care of them. In the back of my mind I wanted to make one last track for the record (this was near the end of the production period) and I jumped into my home studio for a couple of hours while the puppies were sleeping. I liked that the title and the feel of the track were implying some kind of warm connection to somebody (or something) and it probably sounds like something more romantic... but also that the source was the "romance" of this domestic life of taking care of kids, dogs... Both Johan and I have kids and I think that feeling of working to create art within the demands of that family framework is part of the record. I think we're both people who are really happy to have families, so it's not a "struggle" to do this, but there is a particular feeling of creating material within this overlapping set of connections and responsibilities. I am often working on music late at night or early in the morning, to fit in around my family or work schedule, and I have grown to really appreciate this feeling, where you are taking little moments for yourself to create something.  
As far as a voice, I'd love to do more music with Johan where we work with a singer...  
**Johan:** I think this track particularly captures the sweetness of being sleepless with babies or puppies, but also being very content in where you are.  
On the matter of singing – I've always felt this track was leaning a bit into Dev Hynes territory. I'm very inspired by Sam Amidon's work with Nico Muhly (which maybe shows on "Reunion") and I think both Jason and I don't differentiate too much between music with song and music without, it's all just music, and we would love to work with the right singer – it would have to be a lyricist as well, I couldn't write a lyric if my life depended on it.

### Q / 02

*Could you walk us through a sound on the record you're particularly happy with — one acoustic and one synthesised, if possible? The treated cello on "Hymn", say, or the DX7 on "Mornings with Rita". How did you get there: the instrument and how it was miked, the processing, the patch or drum machine settings, whether it went through tape? Please feel free to get technical — some of our readers will want the details.*

**Jason:** An interesting thing about this record technically is that we worked on it over a period of time, maybe 1.5 years. During that time, I moved into a slightly larger room at my place, and had a new zither built. So my recording practice kind of evolved within the production period of the record. One thing about Johan and I is that he works a lot on film scoring, and I have historically done a lot of home recording, although in the last couple of years I have started to work in "proper" studios.  
A lot of my parts were recorded on a single Neumann condenser, essentially straight into the DAW. So my elements were very acoustic and also included things like the sound of the room, myself breathing, everything that comes with that way of recording. Johan also recorded certain elements acoustically but (I think) was treating them a bit more, and he recorded a number of things like synths that don't have that "in the room" feel. I think we started to develop a sound between us that merged these two sensibilities, and also Johan would process some of my acoustic elements, which blurred the lines between these things in a way that was interesting to us. I've long been interested in the contrast between my TR6 drum machine, which sounds very un-acoustic, and the sound of something like the zither, where you hear all the strings and echoing in the soundboard. I like the contrast of those elements a lot. Part of my "sound" when I'm recording is quite intuitive – I use this one mic for basically everything, and often when I'm recording, I'm trying out different ideas and instruments, so for me home recording is a lot about working quickly, and finding out where the track is going. I know my room and the mic really well, so I think I can just place it pretty instinctively and get a good result.  
**Johan:** A lot of the cello recordings on this were done in my living room, but with the same AKG 414 I use in the studio. I played some of it with a soft pick, which gave an almost staccato bowed sound at times. It's really a collage of different rooms and mics – and as Jason says, a few line-in synths. I'm no production wizard and have a very limited set of go-to plug-ins and synths. I like my DX7 and Juno-106 (one knob per function only) and then I'm using the Soundtoys package for sound treatments excessively. The Crystallizer is one of my main tools, which has shaped a lot of the strings, zithers, guitars and pianos on this album. Almost all the cello recordings are going through EchoBoy tape as well.  
My favourite sound on the record is the saxophone wails Jason is playing on "Sweden Organ", which lead into a wailing pitched-down violin solo that I'm playing, just my favourite moment.

![Jason Dungan and Johan Carøe on Routine](https://storage.ghost.io/c/6b/c4/6bc44280-60e0-4784-b78b-3377713d3254/content/images/2026/10/Jason-Dungan-_-Johan-Car--e---PRESS-PHOTO-3----Dennis-Morton.jpg)

### Q / 03

*Jason, the zither has become central to Blue Lake. It carries a long folk and parlour history and a very particular timbre. What keeps you with it, and what does it still refuse to do for you?*

**Jason:** My beginnings with the zither were when I found an old Swedish zither at a flea market here, and was very intrigued by the multi-string soundscape. The actual instrument was pretty busted so I started building my own, and what intrigued me was making my own instrument that could have its own design, built after playing in a way that seemed interesting to me. I wanted to play with both hands, so I made bridges on the instrument and spaced out the strings. This brought it somewhat more in line with the feel of a guitar, which made sense to me. I liked that a self-made instrument was somewhat free of the history that comes with a traditional instrument. My zithers opened up some sound spaces for me that also influenced a lot how I play guitar. And because it's a new instrument, I feel like I'm still discovering loads of ideas and possibilities in it, both in the tunings and in how I play.  
Because it has a fixed tuning, it has certain things it can't do – on guitar, I really enjoy being able to change keys or bring in surprising combinations, and the zither is somewhat frozen in its tuning at any given time. I think the malleability of the guitar is still really attractive to me, so I think that I really love working with both instruments, as they provide a really useful contrast in the conception of various pieces.

### Q / 04

*Johan, you work as a film composer and have collaborated with Angelo Badalamenti. Writing to picture is a discipline of exact duration. What did it leave in the way you treat a sound that has to wait?*

Johan: Actually, my film scoring work is often a very fluid process, where I do a lot of early sketches and demos on the screenplay, that then find their way into the editing in collaboration with the editor. It's messy, there are many versions, but it's rarely after picture lock I'm beginning to work – the music is usually locked in with the edit as a part of the film's DNA, that is the process I prefer and find most rewarding for everyone. I've often thought my collaborative projects carry some of the same elements in process, the fluid bouncing of ideas and sketches back and forth until something takes a shape. I'm thinking about music a lot as sculpting these days, getting material down and then editing chunks out.

### Q / 05

*Jason, you've said music grows out of our wider lives as people, workers and parents, and out of daydreaming. Music culture still sells the myth of long, uninterrupted creative time. What have interruptions given you that free time never did?*

**Jason:** I think partly I have this idea because I've made my own music in some form for many years, basically since I was a teenager, but for most of those years I wasn't trying to release the music or pursue it professionally. I just played and recorded and pursued it as a passionate, semi-private pursuit. This was in some ways an odd approach to music-making but it also meant that my connection to music wasn't with an idea that it was a job or something that I could or should do all the time. One obviously needs time and space to make things, and I work quite hard to create space in my life where I can work to make money for certain periods and then create free space where I can tour or record. Music is a daily part of my life, where even when I'm not directly writing or performing or recording, I'm playing guitar, I'm listening to music, I'm now starting to play and teach my kids things on guitar or drums. I am deeply passionate about making music but it's something for me that is just kind of woven into my life and inextricable from my existence. In that way it emerges from a lot of experiences and interactions that are in some ways non-musical, but the experiences of family life, of working, of walking my dog or cycling in the city inform my relationship to music in a million ways. As much as I'd love to just be able to make music every day 9 to 5, a part of me worries that I would lose this connection to wider experiences and that perhaps the music would start to be made within some kind of bubble. Maybe this is a long way of saying that the interruptions inspire and inform my music, and maybe are what help give it meaning to me personally.

![Jason Dungan and Johan Carøe on Routine](https://storage.ghost.io/c/6b/c4/6bc44280-60e0-4784-b78b-3377713d3254/content/images/2026/10/Jason-Dungan-_-Johan-Car--e---PRESS-PHOTO-4----Dennis-Morton.jpg)

### Q / 06

*Johan, you described the process as improvisation with time stretched. In a room, you react within a second; here the reaction sometimes took months. What survives spontaneity when the answer comes that late, and what is lost?*

**Johan:** I have borrowed a lot from Arthur Russell and his title-mantra "First Thought Best Thought". For most of us, a lot of the best takes usually are the first ones, before we start overthinking. But when you aren't playing in a room together, but playing via email, you get to react to recordings, play back to that, which then puts the original recording in a new light; there is now a new counterpoint, that you have to make room for or adapt to.  
Our process is mostly improv and I don't think either of us has re-recorded a take. On my part, it's all improvised first takes. But they have been edited together, to leave room, breath and transparency, sometimes being pitched up or down to make sonic space.  
Months had passed between sessions, but when I have been engaged in the editing and recording, it has been quite swift, playful and then forwarded to Jason.

### Q / 07

*Arthur Russell and Les Disques du Crépuscule come up every time this record is described. Set them aside for a moment: which records, places or non-musical things were really in the room with you?*

**Jason:** Yeah I think those references are real for us, but as is often the case, it wasn't like they were sitting on the table in the studio. It's more like a reflection afterwards to name them. For me it was two rooms: my former very small home studio where I made a lot of my parts on the record, and a small room in a house in Sweden that we share with Maria's mother (which Johan also knows and has recorded in). That house in Sweden looks out into a field with cows, and has a really nice old pump organ. The feeling of intimacy of recording in those spaces was big for me. I think around this time I started getting into song-oriented music again, kind of returning to music I loved as a teenager and hearing it with fresh ears. There's an early Jonathan Richman album called It's Time for Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers that really struck me, just with its simplicity and the beauty of its arrangements. And Larry Heard, I got his music big-time into my head during this time, and just really responded to the way he gets so much feeling out of really elegant, minimal constructions. The drum machine and synth element got me excited to work with those sounds, which don't necessarily quite fit into the Blue Lake soundspace. So I was excited on this record to dig into some ideas that I was excited about but which sat outside my "usual" practice, which always seems like a good starting point. As a final thing, it's my job to get up with the kids for school, and school in Denmark starts pretty early. Especially in autumn and winter it's pretty dark and cold, but there's also a joy in that quiet, early time when you turn on a little light or play music, and I think that feeling was also there for me.  
**Johan:** I think this album holds a lot of timestamps for me – I stayed home with my daughter for her first 18 months and there is a lot of that in the record. Our old apartment, the living room, and the spare room in my in-laws' house in Jutland where we spent a lot of time the past three or four years. My father was also dying of a lung disease when we began working on this, he passed last year, so there is also that – the juxtaposition of it all. I think life has happened, to me, to a lot of my friends, it's not the rehearsal of youth anymore – it's highs and lows and the album captures that for me. We have just been moving and I found a box of old CDs including Road Movies by John Adams, and it took me through all of this formative music that I haven't revisited in some years, but which has shaped my musical DNA completely – Sam Amidon, Nico Muhly, Nadia Sirota, David Lang – and I hear them all in my contributions to Routine.

### Q / 08

*Why call a record built out of interruptions Routine?*

**Jason:** The short answer is that a lot of the titles came from one-word working titles made by Johan which stuck... I think the titles also turned out to be quite good and to connect to the feelings and themes in the music. And without overdoing the domestic theme, I think that both of us are kind of looking for spaces in which the magic of music can emerge from the spaces that are right next to us, instead of some kind of rarefied, special place that artists are supposed to inhabit. Daily life is in some sense a series of interruptions, and at the same time consists of this kind of endless flow. When you have kids, I think you stop thinking "what do I want to do today?" and start thinking "what do I have to do today?". Before you have kids, this seems like a terrifying loss of independence, but actually it can be quite freeing. By working on some music a little bit each day, I am being interrupted, but the music itself stays where it is, and by creating a routine around it I can make something solid out of that daily flow.  
**Johan:** What Jason said – I also think the title points to the musical content, there are many repetitions which are interrupted by new sections of repeating patterns. Very Routine to me.  

### Q / 09

*You both keep busy separate practices — Blue Lake, film scores, other collaborations. What does working as a duo let you do that your own projects don't?*

**Jason:** For me, the duo music was definitely a way to try out new sounds and practices. It was also just inspiring and stimulating. Johan would send over files, and there was already some music there! It was cool to look at how I could respond, and perhaps add some surprises, put in some twists, and send it back to see what happened next. At the time we started making this music, I had mostly been making Blue Lake recordings solo, playing everything myself. It was freeing to not only share the creation of the music, but to let go of the "complete" authorship I had typically had over the Blue Lake music. I also just learned a lot from Johan's process, which is always great.  
**Johan:** I always think of my collaborative projects as a way of enjoying making music; film scoring, as enjoyable as it is, can be very hard work. This album has been made out of enjoyment. The way I grow most as an artist is through my collaborators, it's always such a joy. I knew Jason a little from before we began working on this, but always had a strong sense that we had shared references and artistic interests. And it has just been so great to get to know someone you respect, learn from them and be inspired by their artistic insights and practice.

###   
Q / 10

*What is the last piece of music, by someone else, that changed how you work?*

**Jason:** There's a song by Labi Siffre called "Crying Laughing Loving Lying", which is a really beautiful and affecting song, that uses voice, acoustic guitar, and some low-key band backing. I go back to this song a lot, just as a kind of reminder of how it's important to build out a piece of music from a core idea or core feeling, and to make choices based on what best serves the piece of music overall. The guitar part on the track is stripped down and minimal, using repetition in a way that benefits the experience of the piece and allows the emotional impact of his singing to come through. I'm drawn to the idea of instrumentation being in service to the larger structure of the music, rather than for the instrument to draw attention to itself.  
**Johan:** "Sally Gooden" on the EP Froggy by Sam Amidon and Sam Wilkes. I've been quite occupied with the whole EP, hard to put a finger on but I find it very intriguing. The mash-up of synth and bass chords and fiddle jig made me want to practise a lot on my violin playing. But beyond my limitations as a violin player, I just find the combined universes of the two very refreshing and inspiring.

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