Interview: Michael A. Muller (OJAS Music)

Michael A. Muller on his new release with Otto A. Totland and launching OJAS Music with Devon Turnbull.

When you walk into a listening space built around an OJAS system, the first thing you notice is how still it is. As the phones disappear and conversations taper off, the atmosphere shifts and attendees settle in for a brief oasis of peaceful intentionality away from the fragmented attention spans of daily life under late capitalism.

Recalibration from passive hearing to active listening is the goal that drives Unna, the first release on the newly formed OJAS Music label, launched in partnership with The Vinyl Factory. For its artist Michael A. Muller, who is also co-founder of the label alongside Devon Turnbull, the idea of launching a catalogue is about fostering a more focused encounter between listener and sound.

"I've been a recording artist for about 20 years now," Muller says. "I've also managed my own projects, handled bookings, and dealt with logistics. I understand the industry from multiple angles and that changes how you think about putting music into the world."

OJAS Music grew out of a long-running conversation with Turnbull. The two had been friends for years, connected by a shared listening culture and a similar set of frustrations about what happens to music once it's out in the world and the frictions between contemporary life and quality listening time come into play.

"We kept coming back to the same thing," Muller explains. "It's becoming harder and harder to get people to really listen. Even with people close to you, everyone's busy, everyone's distracted. The idea of going to a record shop, finding something, sitting down and doing nothing but listening, that's rare now."

From there, the logic of a label started to take shape. Rather than focusing on streaming metrics and saleability, the pair decided to rebuild physical ways of listening from the ground up.

A model for this approach can be found in Turnbull’s work with The Vinyl Factory at 180 Studios in London. His Listening Room installation demonstrates that listening can be an event with its own environment and rituals, somewhere in between the chaos of a live gig and the private individualism of solo home listening. Recorded music, in that context, has become inseparable from the space in which it is heard and the people it's heard alongside, and both add new dimensions to listening.

By the time Muller travelled to London last autumn to meet with The Vinyl Factory team, the direction felt clear for him. If listening can be shaped by environment, equipment and format, then a label could be structured around those elements rather than around genre or scale.

"They were immediately open to it," he says. "One release to begin and we'll see how it develops."

Unna became that first release for OJAS Music. The EP emerged from a long-distance collaboration with Norwegian composer Otto A. Totland, known for his work with Deaf Center and his solo piano recordings. The two first met around fifteen years ago at an ambient music festival in Seattle and stayed loosely connected, exchanging music over the years. "I've always loved his piano playing," Muller says. "It feels out of time and very personal."

The transition to them becoming collaborators started informally. Muller's rework of one of Totland's earlier compositions led to an exchange of new material and soon piano fragments, soundscapes and ideas were flying between Norway and Los Angeles.

"We started in 2023 just sending things back and forth," he explains. "After about a year and a half, we had eight pieces. We chose five that felt cohesive."

Once it was finished, the project found its home within the newly conceived label. In their collaborative, long-running recording process before this, the pair hadn't been concerned with streaming strategies or release cycles, they had just been having fun.

"There was no endpoint," Muller says. "It was just the joy of making something."

The absence of external pressure can be heard in the music itself as sparse piano lines hang suspended in long decays. Harmonic movement is minimal and space plays a very active role. Unna is made up of peaceful and luxurious music that rewards full attention with an entrancing, meditative journey.

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Alongside a vinyl edition produced by The Vinyl Factory, Unna is available on CD, cassette and made-to-order reel-to-reel tape transferred directly from the master. Digital platforms have remained part of the picture, but they're not OJAS Music’s central concern.

"The physical formats are the focus," Muller says. "Vinyl, tape, CD: having artwork in front of you, touching the object and having that tactile experience is part of listening."

The reel-to-reel edition is a particularly telling example of the label’s goals. Offering a format that is both exceedingly niche and technically demanding sounds like most record labels' worst nightmare but it exists because the label is built around quality listening rather than sales figures. "If someone has a quarter-inch tape machine, they can order a transfer from the master tape," he says. "It's specialised, but it's there."

Muller isn't positioning OJAS Music against streaming so much as trying to expand the ways people can listen. "Most people will still hear it on their laptop or on the subway," he says. "That's reality, but its real purpose is to be listened to."

The production chain reflects the same ethos and attention to detail. Mastering was handled by Frederic Stader in Cologne using fully analogue valve equipment. Lacquer cutting was performed in real time while physical tapes were shipped between stages. Unna was evaluated on large-scale hi-fi systems before final approval.

"It's definitely less economical," Muller says. "It takes more time but every step is deliberate."

The aim is for the record to translate across listening environments, revealing detail on high-resolution systems while retaining coherence on everyday playback. "There's a lot of sub-bass that really opens up on a large system," he explains. "But it still works on smaller ones and that balance matters."

Unna's first public presentation will come through a listening session at the Cooper Hewitt in New York, where an OJAS system currently operates as part of an ongoing exhibition. The master tape, lacquer and vinyl pressing will be played sequentially, allowing listeners to hear each stage of the recording's physical transformation. More sessions are planned, including a potential presentation at 180 Studios.

"I'd love to do a listening tour," Muller says. "Tokyo, London, New York, Paris, Berlin, and present the music the way we imagined it."

Muller is quick to explain that Unna isn’t just intended for exclusive audiences with beefed up soundsystems. A listener at home with a standard turntable matters to Muller just as much. "That's the beauty of it," he says. "It works on every level."

With Unna, OJAS Music establishes a vision for how listening can work rather than launching a brand or genre: the catalogue will move across ambient, classical, jazz, experimental, archival work and more. Turnbull brings decades of designing listening environments. Muller brings a long history as a recording artist and label operator. Together, they are attempting to treat recording, production, format and playback as parts of a continuous, special experience.

Launching a label usually involves ambitions for scale, a desire for visibility and highly pressured momentum. OJAS Music starts a little bit differently with an 18-minute record, a limited pressing, a room full of people sitting still and an invitation to listen closely.

Unna by Michael A. Muller & Otto A. Totland is out via OJAS Music and The Vinyl Factory. Order a copy now.