Jason Dungan and Johan Carøe have shared Mornings with Rita, the second single from Routine, their first album together, out on Tonal Union on September 25th.
The two Copenhagen-based multi-instrumentalists didn’t set out to make an album. Dungan, who records as Blue Lake, met Carøe at Andersabo, the Swedish cabin and residency Dungan has run since 2016, where Carøe and Sofie Birch wrote Repair Techniques – for which they were nominated for Composers of the Year by the Danish Music Critics Society in 2022. It’s worth noting that Carøe is also a film composer, which does surface in this release, and has worked with Angelo Badalamenti.
Routine came together slowly, over years, against a run of personal upheaval: Carøe said goodbye to his father and welcomed his first child. The pair sent each other fragments of melodies and patterns, working up responses when time allowed, assembling a palette of zither, clarinet, cello and saxophone alongside tape, drum machine and Yamaha DX7. Dungan laid down zither, melodica and acoustic guitar in the twilight hours; Carøe manipulated, stretched and pitched those melodic pathways with “line-in and headphones” during newborn naptimes.
“I’m very interested in the ways in which music and art emerge from our wider experiences as people, workers, parents and in the daydreaming activity of making music,” Dungan explains.
“I think the process was definitely capturing moments in time, but over a long time,” Carøe adds. “It was a bit like improvisation, but with time stretched.”
The two have shared a record once already, on Dungan’s terms. Reviewing last year’s The Animal for KLOF, Glenn Kimpton heard Carøe’s looming cello growl bring “a shade of seriousness and perhaps underlying melancholy” to Flowers for David (Carøe also plays banjo and keyboard on the track). That album, and Weft before it, tracked Dungan moving out of solitary layering and into a band — Kimpton signed off the Weft review wondering “where this craftsman will take us next”.
Routine answers that, though not in the direction those records pointed. There is no band and no bandleader here, nor is it a Blue Lake album; it goes out under both names — it’s a true collaboration.
Tonal Union describes Routine as blending “pop orientated sounds, Avant-garde minimalism, folk and new age with the emotive depth of film-score”, and the first single bears that out. On Routine I, the gentle grandeur of a cello undulates as notes of zither and clarinet overlap, every element ascending into a dramatic epiphany before a dissonant crescendo. Somewhere between an Arthur Russell instrumental and the main theme of a cult film score, it’s a beautiful introduction to an idyllic but stylistically varied set of ten instrumentals.
Routine (September 25th, 2026) Tonal Union