Good Vibrations, Awesome Vistas
Portland-based artist Chris Johanson makes deceptively naive work whose honesty and exuberance draws from folk and street art, and the punk DIY ethic. For his next project, a limited-edition, vinyl-only record label called Awesome Vistas, he’s bringing friends together to create art and music in the same spirit of community, collaboration and “good vibes.”
Why a record label?
I always wanted to put out records, but my brain was too busy to organize it. Then Linda Hagood gave me these recordings to check out. I really, really love her music and, it was just like a CD-R and...
You wanted to do something special for it?
Yeah. She’s great, and is one of the reasons I really wanted to do this.
It’s nice to hear that back story. It’s nearly impossible to find anything about Awesome Vistas.
(laughs) I don’t have a Web site. I like that it says there’s no way to get a hold of us on the records. I like that they just go out there and are just these beautiful things. I’m trying to get visual art energy mixed in with the music scene. Most of the art I collect is prints, and I really love the more democratic openness of cheap art editions. I want to put that same attention to detail, the same kind of love, into records. It’s great to sell art in a gallery, and I’m happy I get to do it, but not everybody can go there.
What kind of bands will you be working with?
It’s all pretty vague right now: just people that have good energy. So far it’s been The Enablers, The Oh Sees, and Sic Alps from San Francisco; Jackie-O Motherfucker and Dragging An Ox Through Water from Portland, Linda Hagood and Flower of Flesh and Blood from New York… They’re all serious lifers. I totally love art, and I love making music, and I love people that, for them, it’s a religious kind of necessity for their life to create. Now I want to start pulling people together in different ways. I’m putting on a show in Milan called Life is Music, Music is Life with Brendan Fowler [of BARR], Tom Greenwood [of Jackie-O], Jutta Koether, Jo Jackson, Steve Claydon from Add N to X, the Sic Alps, and a bunch of other people.
So you’re forming a community by putting out these records?
Yeah. I know from personal experience that a lot of what happens in the art world is from people hooking up people together. I think that’s the way it is a lot in life. I just think that life is so harsh, and I don’t like it to be harsh. It makes my personal life experience better when I do stuff like this. I feel like you have to or the world falls apart. I think it’s a moral obligation to do things. I think it’s a moral obligation to not be by yourself. That makes total sense to me. It just seems normal.
Are you only going to be putting out new music?
Actually, the next record is an older band called Yogurt. Hickey, this infamous bike messenger gutter punkish band from San Francisco, re-formed as Yogurt because they didn’t want to tour anymore. [Yogurt] only made home recorded tapes that pretty much nobody ever heard, even though they had this cult following. We’re compiling them all now. I’m amped on the idea of putting out more specific side projects, and side projects of side projects, or recording a live show from a bathroom, and paying attention to these more quieter moments of now.
