other titles...
- Everyday - A Sequel
- Du Parc (with N NAO)
- Time Zone (with Haco)
- Cloud Level (with Ytamo)
- Muffin - A Song For My Cat
- L'Empire des lumières
- In-Between Places
- Event Flow - A Sequence
- Story Board (with Pink Navel)
- Vertigo (with Sook-Yin Lee)
- Death Is Not The End
- Joni Sadler Forever
Joni Void
Every Life Is A Light
constellation
Montréal producer and sound collagist, Joni Void, returns with their warmest and most welcoming album yet, wedding their sampledelic songcraft to rubbery and percolated downtempo beats.
'Every Life Is A Light' expands on Void’s recent stylistic turn towards more languorous and mellow lo-fi production, foreshadowed by the drifting looseness and ambient bricolage of their preceding experimental sound-art record. This transitional sensibility now shapes more defined song structures and styles, with loops are given time and space to unspool, and rhythms shot through the softer-focus lens of trip-hop and dub.
'Every Life Is A Light' swaps the twitchy insistence of Void’s acclaimed early albums for a newfound lightness and suppleness, still imbued with all the restlessness, sonic detailing, and emotional resonance that made their name. The neurotic broken machine kinetics of earlier Void, summarized by Sasha Geffen as “drawing despair and wonder from within the vast unfeeling of digital communication” in an 8.0 Pitchfork review, may be chilling out, but Void is becoming an ever better conjurer of hauntological feeling.
'Every Life Is A Light' summons this in a comparatively buoyant, benevolent, head-nodding journey more open to tenderness and modest joys. Perhaps it’s the sound of Void at greater peace with themselves and the world, despite the bittersweet cost: even as it channels grief, memorializing comrades and companions recently deceased, this album wants light. Void’s raw materials continue to draw heavily from samples (their own Walkman cassette field recordings and songs by others) and from a wide community of musical guests.
Vocalists, Haco on “Time Zone” and Ytamo on “Cloud Level”, help levitate what could be lost tracks from a mid-90s Too Pure Records compilation of skewed-lounge electronica. Canadian musician Sook-Yin Lee sings on lead single “Vertigo,” a sinewy 80bpm tape-loop and bassline groove propelled by psychedelically-layered lyrics that eventually turn the song in on itself entirely, like Grace Jones’ “Nightclubbing” covered by Animal Collective. One of Void’s greatest hip-hop loves is the Ruby Yacht collective; charter member Pink Navel drops some brilliant verses on “Story Board.”
The album’s two minimal tracks, an extended piano loop set to a slow beat and shimmering electronics on “Muffin–A Song For My Cat” and the languid sampled bass riff and breakbeat of “Event Flow,” are perhaps most overtly ‘lofi chill.’
'Every Life Is A Light' is Joni Void’s most coherent and congenial record while relinquishing none of their experimentalist acumen as a producer or emotional attunement as a composer. Instead these qualities flourish, on an album that lights a humble flame for the fragile promise of homespun creative collaboration as unalienated labour and therapeutic communion, making an enchantingly idiosyncratic contribution to downtempo sample music along the way. Thanks for listening.
RIYL: Cibo Matto, Andy Stott, Blithe Field, Yuka Honda, DJ Shadow, Kenny Seagal, Susumu Yokota