A bassoon and a violin walk into a void. Somewhere between them, in the negative space of their resonance, Sullivan Johns listens intently, extracting ghost frequencies and melodic slippages that shouldn’t exist - but do. "Pitched Variations" is an album that doesn’t just explore sound but interrogates it, nudging notes toward dissonance, stretching their identities until they exist in multiple states at once, like a sonic Schrödinger’s cat.

Constructed from single, isolated instrumental tones, these pieces move with an unsettling elegance. "Signal Notes" opens the album with a sense of quiet instability, its carefully warped frequencies shifting like light refracted through imperfect glass. The title "Transistor Bassoon" alone feels like a paradox - woodwind repurposed as circuitry, breath transformed into voltage. "Overlapping System" and "Violin Fore" lean into interference tones and spectral harmonics, teasing out melodies that flicker at the edge of perception. This is music that exists between things: between notation and noise, between human touch and algorithmic manipulation.

Johns, a composer with roots in both experimental music and the acoustic possibilities of the mundane, has built a reputation for dissecting sound like a forensic scientist with a poetic streak. His previous work, "Assembled Parts", mapped loss and memory through drone and field recordings, and "Pitched Variations" feels like a continuation of that investigation - this time with the most minimal materials possible. Recorded in his repurposed factory space in Hebden Bridge, the album maintains an industrial kind of austerity, yet there’s warmth in its meticulous deconstruction.

Adding another layer, poet Jazmine Linklater contributes text, an element that, though unseen in the tracklist, suggests a literary counterpoint to Johns’ auditory philosophy. One can imagine words, like tones, bending and colliding, forming new meanings through proximity and distortion.

This is not background music. It demands a kind of deep listening that forces the ears to recalibrate. A bassoon and a violin do indeed walk into a void - but in "Pitched Variations", it’s the space between them that sings.