Animative embodies a culmination of the harmonically rich, loops-inflected sound that first germinated on Johnson’s 2020 full band release Freedom Exercise and on his immersive 2024 solo album Unusual Object. The ten track album – co-produced by Johnson and Paul Bryan, featuring contributions from Meshell Ndegeocello, Macie Stewart, Marquis Hill, Ben Lumsdaine, and more – is a marvel of electro-acoustic innovation that combines compositional brilliance and technological ambition into a mesmerizing blend of skeletal soul-jazz, post-bop, electronic minimalism, and dreamy ambience. 

Throughout the album, Johnson puts sophisticated technologies to work, often using the saxophone to control a sampler or a drum machine, triggering changes in a loop or an effect. But it’s always in service of a feeling — working to escape the trap of mastery. “I'm looking to make it feel more human,” Johnson says. In particular, he cites fellow Chicagoan, saxophonist, and 360-degree artistic thinker Eddie Harris and the brilliant piano eccentric Mal Waldron as influences on his approach to breaking form and emphasizing the corporeal elements of performance. 

The spectrum of influence, clarity of intention, and confidence in craft present in Johnson’s approach yields stunning results on Animative. Whether it’s spiritual and wandering works augmented by the idiosyncratic overloads of hardware technology (as on the stirring “Aughts Hymnal”), stumbling funk that pulsates with the glow of otherworldly deep sea life (“High Step”), surrealist dancefloor cuts (“Jazz Chord Possession”) or cloudy collages of shoegaze saxophone (“Upstairs 2021”), Animative coheres into a strange and beautiful whole — a generous and spellbinding reflection of its auteurist creator.