Gulls is the long-running project of Jesse Munro Johnson, active since the early 2000’s, shaping a body of work that moves between dub pressure, ambient drift, and live, improvisational recording. Based in the Pacific Northwest, Johnson also runs Boomarm Nation, a label rooted in dub and experimental global bass — an ethos that carries directly into his own music, where composition, tradition, and performance unfold in the same breath.

Gulls’ sound is treated as a living system — built through hands-on recording, looping, and real-time interplay across woodwinds, percussion, strings, bass, and electronics. Parts are played, repeated, and reshaped in motion, with an emphasis on feel, space, and interaction over fixed arrangement. Alongside his own work, Johnson’s production and engineering for artists including El Mahdy Jr, Mdou Moctar, and Saint Abdullah feeds back into this process, keeping the sound tactile, responsive, and in flux.

Time Spirals extends this language into a continuous cycle of repetition and return. Built from reed and bamboo flutes, trumpet, hand percussion, guitars, and electronics, the record is performed, looped, and layered in real time so that acoustic breath and electronic tone circulate within the same shifting field. The album resists linear progression, instead unfolding as a series of interconnected states — each piece reflecting and refracting within the layers of itself.

The result is a record that moves like an evolving system rather than a sequence of tracks: dub-informed in its spatial weight, ambient in its openness, and grounded in physical performance.
Repetition becomes the mechanism of change, where return is never exact, only transformed.

Order Gulls – Time Spirals Cassette at BCSM SHOP