JJ Johnson’s long-term project More Than Two pivots on the maintenance of intricately networked relationships. The cast of participants, all of whom Johnson has met through dating apps and an extended network of friends, have collaborated over an 18-month period to produce individual ‘episodes’, or songs–whereby conversations conducted elsewhere are recorded by Johnson, reformulated as scripts, and performed within musical scores. More Than Two: Omnibus is the final performance of the project, in which each previous episode has been rolled into one continuous piece, and meticulously workshopped into form during a series of rehearsals. 

Observing these rehearsals as they unfold, it’s unclear what the group is aiming or feeling for within them. Fragments of the script are passed between them and reformulated for pace, tone and rhythm, until a consensus on their delivery is reached. Sounds are collectively measured in accordance with an understanding of both their musical qualities, and their ongoing resonance with Johnson’s lived experience. As many of the group have at least a proximate experience of the conversations being circulated (either as the original speakers, or as listeners), final decisions often rest with them–particularly so during moments when the script becomes momentarily lodged or stuck on a difficult memory. Part of the task is to maintain the metronome between an acute sensitivity to what’s felt, and a kind of pathological buoyancy that enables the rhythm to continue.

Pulled into form in this way, More Than Two: Omnibus enacts a kind of collapsed and continuous present, in which the narrative of the conversations it recalls are edited out of linearity and played on a loop from afar. The hope seems to be that precise rearrangement of the recorded material will neutralise its emotional potency. Former moments of speech become modular, blocks that can slid into place or used to undercut one another’s urgency. Early medieval music theory similarly framed music as freeing individuals from temporal attachments in order to obtain the clarity of eternal truths, which, so the argument goes, verbal language is incapable of pursuing. In a later extension of this principle, philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer argued that the simple effect of music on our inner being ‘is so entirely and deeply understood’ as to be received in our ‘inmost consciousness as a perfectly universal language’. Latently theological, the idea recalls uncomfortable, utopian preoccupations with the possibility of a harmonious, unbroken understanding. But it also echoes the title of one of Johnson’s earlier films, A Perfect Instrument (Kristina), 2016, in which song is understood not as a vehicle through which we might detach from our conditions, but as a means through which to explore what might be uncovered from within them.

The chorus we hear in More Than Two repeatedly loops and knots on itself, not to discredit the radical possibilities of conversation, but because often this is what conversation really does, what human subjects really do. This disruption of syntax is a route to better express the urgent desire for connection with another through speech or sound; but one that resides away from the logic of reliable coherence. If there is a story to be felt for in More Than Two: Omnibus, it’s grounded in a sense of pursuing transparency in order to relate more openly–but also more intricately–to those you’ve invited into your life. When it’s possible, talking is one mode through which we validate and define who we understand ourselves to be. In this sense, prioritising conversation as a practice with its own wayward emancipatory potential echos the lucid and compelling argument the writer Adrienne Rich makes for “honourable human relationships” in her essay On Lies, Secrets and Silence, in which she explains that “truthfulness anywhere means a heightened complexity. But it’s a movement into evolution.” Maintaining relationships within these terms can be understood by Rich’s account as “a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.”

Around halfway through the performance there is a rare moment of uninterrupted monologue, a pause in the call-and-response, during which a voice delivers a stream of universalised, self-help style emotional advice (taken from a book that lends the work’s title), and cautions us to remember that amongst other things, “a healthy relationship must first of all be resilient, able to respond to the changes and complexity life brings.” If this registers as a platitude, it also holds out the persistently alluring (and dangerous) false promise; that while unpredictability and anguish might be inevitable, anything can be endured with the right attitude or adaptation.

The web of romantic relations that comprise More Than Two can therefore be understood as a vehicle for collective sense making, just as much as one for nurturing affection. It suggests that there are always many voices involved in any conversation, whether heard or unpredictably recalled from the past, and that relinquishing the urge to individually control outcomes (or influence them through subterfuge) is vital for “hearing” those you’re in dialogue with. The openness, and of course the vulnerability, this implies, can also be thought of in relation Rich’s writing elsewhere, in which she explains: “The possibilities that exist between two people, or among a group of people, are a kind of alchemy. They are the most interesting thing in life. The liar is someone who keeps losing sight of these possibilities. When relationships are determined by manipulation, by the need for control, they may possess a dreary, bickering kind of drama, but they cease to be interesting. They are repetitious; the shock of human possibilities has ceased to reverberate through them.”

An element of this alchemy relies on entering into the world of another, whilst continually respecting its preexistence before you arrived. While More Than Two: Omnibus certainly foregrounds a wish for transparency, the script is therefore equally weighted with the silences, gaps, opacities and misunderstandings that inform the healthy development of space (and sense of humour) within relationships, but that also risk their undoing. Though building a language with another forms the basis of genuine intimacy, there is also a crucial admission of conversation’s inherent limitations and impossibilities–whereby the ever-slipping quality of communication is in itself an approach to meaning, or a mode of sorting and “ordering” in its own right. A voice recalls a previous agreement: “anyone can come, anyone can go / and we’ll just see what sticks”. One speaker later counsels another, “there’s moments of punctuation in a relationship [...] colons and semicolons and like ellipses and hyphens and all of that.” Those pauses can be moments of pacing, or a widening impasse, or they can, as poet Anne Carson has described, refer ‘not to silence, but to a certain fundamental opacity of human being, which likes to show the truth by allowing it to be seen hiding’. 

The heavy repetition of vocal loops in the episode titled Thinking It Was You recall the obsessive entrancement and suspension born of waiting for another’s voice to return; of desperately attempting to restore a former harmony through mishearing “every sound in the building / thinking it was you, coming in the door”. So insular is the tone of this recall that it seems at first to be a monologue, until we hear another voice chime in with a single response “aha”–which only sharpens our attention to the self-conscious overspill of our original narrator. “I feel a bit annoyed that I’ve spoken so much, to be honest [...] I’ve given you.. so much to go on…”

In Firstdays of the Year, Helene Cixous’ first novel, a central character insists on their capacity to define and defend the boundaries of their affection; “If I were to love, it would be from afar, from time to time, separately.” Relating on these terms suggests a transparency of needs–the kind of communication that undercuts the capacity for nuance, but that might enable those involved to redefine their emotional responsibility. It’s a sentiment rarely explored within pop music, owing not only to the dominance of monogamous and heterosexual romance, but to the deftness required in order to handle its complexity (it doesn’t make for a catchy chorus). The final refrain of More Than Two: Omnibus, in which voices join together in an absurdist, parodic sing-song of the insistent and subtly disquieting words; “No it’s really nice, to absorb yourself into someone else […]”  works to develop this thought further, and speaks of the fine line between a desire for intimacy, and the total horror self-dilution can imply. Coming back to ground and developing other worlds through conversation might be one way to attempt an alternative.