Listen to the air around your body, the sound of the river, of the breeze.
Bring it inward: listen to your breathing. Listen to your heartbeat, in your chest, in your head.
Push it outward: Listen to the trees. Listen to the birds flying above the trees.
Keep expanding: Listen to the past of your surroundings and what came before you. Listen to the future, and the legacy you will leave behind.
Listen to all of these things, all at once. Hold all these different scopes of listening in your body. You are deep listening.
Dan Johnson is a percussionist and performance artist, a mainstay of the Bristol improvised music scene. Dan is also a practitioner and facilitator of Deep Listening, a practice made famous by composer and experimentalist Pauline Oliveros. It is a practice of sonic awareness, premised on drawing attention to sounds at all scopes around us, at all times, as a form of meditation and a means of heightening attention to sound and its effect on the body.
When I spoke to Dan, he said: “It’s about developing this sort of mind body connection in order to listen to which body movement produces which nature of sound. It’s about patience and tuning into the feeling in the room.
“Deep Listening has this emphasis on past, present and future – especially the past. About understanding where we are and our position in history, having a bigger picture view of life. It really does inform what I’m doing.”
When I first met Dan, it was to experience a one-on-one improvised percussion session – a soundbath tailored to my deep listening. Lying on the floor of his studio as he plays, I drift through the pointillist sounds of intricate playing.
Seeing him perform since, I have been struck by how his playing guides your attention into the instrument – whether a drum kit, a copper pan, a tuning fork, or the bare floor of a venue. It entices you to lean in, to become familiar with its tones and timbres, even across performances that can last multiple hours at high intensity.
“I literally don’t want to be putting bad vibrations out there,” Dan said.
“There are a lot of factors: what’s the feeling in the audience before my set? What’s going on in the world? What’s going on in Bristol? It’s all really important to me. I really care about how my performance affects people.”
In late 2025, Dan suffered a serious sporting injury that left him with a snapped Achilles in his lead leg. For most percussionists, losing 25% of one’s ability to play would spell disaster. For Dan it opened up new ways to explore the relationship between body and instrument.
“The main thing has been dealing with sending the message to my left leg,” he said.
“I’m having ideas I could do with my right leg that I can’t do with my left. So I have to accept those ideas and re-figure them. But I can’t drop the energy on the gig, so it’s about reinterpreting in the moment. It just added another layer to improvising.”
One such performance is The Bellflower, released as a live recording via Newcastle label Panus Productions. It is built in surges; an intensity that pummels not through violence, but with a force like a current pushing you into motion. Part composed, part improvised, it is the perfect encapsulation of Dan’s implosive control over energy, momentum and drive.
As intense as The Bellflower is, it is far from the most physically demanding piece in Dan’s arsenal. One of Dan’s many limbs is planted firmly in performance art, which has led him to some monumental performances: an eight-hour piece, a three-hour drum roll in an elevator, durational works where audiences could come and go while he revealed his process.
“My goal when I’m practicing is – I don’t want to get tired by the end, I don’t want it to be falling apart. So, my practice is actually doing it for two hours, three hours. I will be training a couple of months before a performance. I’ll do it for ages so that the show is basically easy,” Dan said.
Now in 2026, with limbs almost in full working order, Dan is in preparation mode. Late May sees Acid Horse Festival in Wiltshire, where his right foot returns to the kick pedal to perform The Bellflower for the first time since 2024. This spring also brings a series of Deep Listening workshops and new collaborations.
//Words: Ed Holland // Photography: Keith Bolton and Simon Holiday //