As Blue Lake, Copenhagen-based multi-instrumentalist Jason Dungan has made some of the most striking and soothing instrumental music of recent years. On albums like 2023’s Sun Arcs and last year’s Weft, he grafted folky, acoustic strums onto widescreen ambience and long-form improvisation, creating something moving and sophisticated out of a strict DIY ethos. In Johan Carøe, a fellow luminary of the Copenhagen scene, he has found a kindred spirit, albeit one whose practice veers closer to the neoclassical side of ambient music, as well as the more hushed corners of dark ambient. A denizen of stillness and space, Carøe’s most recent solo project was the score for the Danish film The Great Silence, and he has previously collaborated with Sophie Birch, Angelo Badalamenti and Gabo Barranco.
Two heavy-hitters from a city right at the heart of the decade-long boom in ambient music, they were bound to cross paths at some point, but the making of Routine wasn’t simply a case of a chance meeting and a few shared recording sessions. It is more like a shared creative diary, its ideas growing slowly as a friendship developed between the two. This approach allows aspects of real life to imprint themselves on the music, meaning that, for an ostensibly ambient album, Routine explores different moods and shifting modes.
The subtle changes in mood are enhanced by the range of instruments, and the way they are deployed. Carøe’s plucked cello on Hymn, for example, sounds rangy, confident and self-contained, while the same instrument on Routine 1 builds from a low strut to something bigger, ending in a series of proggy, space-age swoops. Silence explores its terrain slowly, and with apparent trepidation, a series of notes advancing quietly but in unpredictable directions.
Instruments build upon each other so lightly that you hardly notice it’s happening. A beautifully gauzy zither and subtle but expressionistic clarinet combine on Clouds, to a backing of pony-trot percussion. On opener Chords, the cello flutters shyly at first, then seems to gain in confidence as a repeated melody emerges. It’s tempting to read the events of a human life into those dynamics: birth, growth, friendship, death. And indeed part of Carøe’s inspiration came from the loss of his father and the birth of his first child. And yet there is more than just a generalised intimacy to these compositions. In places they feel unavoidably particular, like the sunny Mornings With Rita, which has an impatient excitability under its calm veneer, thanks to the kinetic tick of its percussion. It’s a very personal slice of domesticity, and hearing feels like being invited into someone’s home.
Two further tracks, fittingly entitled Home I and Home II, reinforce this idea with sweet, improvised piano motifs and cascades of plucked strings. Reunion sees Dungan’s zither take centre stage, clean and metallic, but also somehow watery, while cello notes tiptoe around the outside. Here the pair are joined by Anna Caroline Olesen, whose operatic outro provides the album with the most immediate of its many moments of near-rapture. Elsewhere those moments are more subdued: the playful dissonance that creeps into closing track Sweden Organ, for example, or the way (on the same song) that the keys and strings seem to wander off in different directions and yet end up in the same place.
Routine, then, is a homage to the quiet and heartwarming mess of domesticity, and ultimately to human closeness. Dungan and Carøe have fashioned a variety of slow music that is rarely imposing and never overly showy, yet which contains a genuine emotional heft. It is also unabashedly enjoyable, from start to finish.
Routine (Spetmeber 25th, 2026) Tonal Union