It would be easier with texts. A poem, for example, or a questionnaire, ways of getting to the bottom of reality with the clarity of words. Music, on the other hand, is more ambiguous, both an opportunity and a challenge. One can call a piece "Dear World" in the hope that the listener would discover in it, just like the artist, a message to the world, an apology perhaps or an invitation to feel responsible for oneself. Whether it will be understood, however, remains an open question, especially if, like Johannes Enders, one has already developed an advanced system of musical coding that translates one's own emotional states and insights into sound. Sometimes he deals with a degradation product of the blood pigment following a dangerous metabolic disorder, sometimes with happiness hormones, without which the positive perception would decolorize to a gray veil of emotional monotony. No problem for the descriptive mind, but a real task if one wants to act without verbal or optical aids.

The phenomenon "Hikikomori" is also such a case. In Japan, it stands for people who gradually break off contact with the outside world and withdraw into a cocoon of self-reference. They not only stay in their rooms to themselves, but also isolate their environment from the rituals of everyday life. For rebellion through withdrawal hits a society built on clear, iron rules of behavior harder than offensive protest. It marks the superfluity of the big picture and the values handed down in favor of a self-chosen autism and is thus a very Japanese way of holding up a mirror to the world. For Johannes Enders, on the other hand, it is a multifaceted semantic field that demands to be encircled. As a medium of approach he chooses Enders Room, a laboratory of long-time companions to whom he no longer has to explain the possibilities of musical realization. They know him as a skeptic and hymnist, as a lateral thinker and moderator of opposites. As one of the most reflective saxophonists of his generation.

Because that's what "Hikikomori" is all about. Formally, Johannes Enders tests the possibilities of contemporary arranging, the dramaturgy of tension arcs and also the stringency of continuous musical movements and transformations. It juxtaposes models, the "Electric Room", which he essentially produced alone and only had colleagues change in places, and the "Acoustic Room", which takes up motifs, continues them and lets the synthetic dissolve in the analog and natural sounding. This also closes the circle to the title theme, which at first seems rather cryptic. For from a musical point of view, Johannes Enders allows the threat to the individual, felt above all through the complexity of the artificial, to dissolve in the naturalness of sound. The equation is simple: the more analog, acoustic, individual power, the more jazz, as Johannes Enders means it. This also works without words.

Text: Ralf Dombrowski