It takes a while to sync up with this Joni Void record. The latest LP from the Montréal artist is a fluttery, meandering piece of work, somehow restless and comforting at the same time. It’s hard to know exactly where to start with it, not because it is necessarily opaque or alienating, but somehow over-familiar, like staggering around a city you’ve only dreamed about before. At one point, a distant voice even calls out “I know this place” in detached, glassy-eyed style. Someone else is lost here, yet they too half-remember wherever this is that they’ve ended up.
It’s a big comparison to make, but there are ways in which the disorientated atmosphere of Every Life Is A Light recalls the uncanny affect of James Ferraro’s Far Side Virtual. On that record, the gloopy postmodernity of the first vaporwave experiments by the likes of Ferraro and Daniel Lopatin solidified into a recognisable approach, one which did not so much recontextualise the all-too-familiar aesthetics of digital kitsch as make them all-consuming in and of themselves. Every Life Is A Light plays some of the same tricks. Pay attention, for example, to the phone interference on ‘In-Between Places’ as it’s pulled into that track’s bionic dub grove before the interruption of a safety announcement bell.
There’s a naivety to much of this record, again chiming with the extremely-online vulnerability of early vaporwave, though perhaps lacking that movement’s sense of irony. The naivety is there in the light-fingered approach to genre. Void often sounds like a kid mashing different-coloured blocks of plasticine together: some hip-hop from here, lounge jazz from there, sleepy downtempo found down the back of something else. It’s also there, though perhaps more knowingly, on the wide-eyed evocation of “Americcaaaaaaa” on ‘Vertigo’, a charming if slightly thin trip-hop lullaby.
In some ways, this openness is appealing, and leads to diverting experiments: the pastel shades of opener ‘Everyday – A Sequel’, for example, beckon listeners into the album with a slow bloom of synth and vocal layers which suggest something enticing and adventurous. Yet it can also lead to some passages of the record feeling a little half-baked (e.g. ’Joni Sadler Forever’, which promises but never delivers much more than its single idea) or, more gratingly, weirdly childish. ‘Muffin – A Song For My Cat’ is as irritatingly precious as its title suggests, while ‘Story Board’ with rapper Pink Navel is inoffensive enough, but it’s definitely too whimsical for its own good.
In its best moments, the kitschily explorative approach of Every Life Is A Light opens up genuinely intriguing avenues to its listeners. Perhaps its greatest strength is that sense of location and space, its re-presentation of a place you feel like you know from a previous life. On those terms, it’s a place worth visiting. How long you should stay is another question.
