Mise En Abyme Joni Void

"Selfless sounded like it was gnashing its teeth, a fantasyland of tension and bruxism. Mise En Abyme subsumes that anxiety into a series of songs that court despair and wonder with equal fervor... Vocals abound on the album's first side, giving the ear something to grip even when they add more texture than narrative. "Dysfunctional Helper" layers a wordless melody sung by Ayuko Goto (also known as Noah, who appeared on Selfless) over a squeaking industrial beat, emphasizing the sanctuary that the voice and the act of singing, even idly, can create in the mind. The percussion suggests urban chaos, while the voice induces calm. "Lov-Ender" braids samples of Montreal musician Catherine Debard's voice into psychedelic polyrhythms. Both songs find their beat over time, rather than being led by it. Human noise directs the machine sound, instead of the other way around... If the record's first half concerns vocal communication, side B stages its breakdown. On "No Reply," Joni Void samples answering machine messages, dial-up modems, and the unmistakable glitchy static old cell phones used to cast across nearby speakers just before receiving a call or text. These are obsolete sounds of anticipation and disappointment, sounds heard playing phone tag on a landline or picking up the receiver while someone else in the house tried to connect to the internet. Maybe they sound like alien noise to someone who's only known one millennium, but Joni Void doesn't aim for nostalgia here; "No Reply" doesn't fetishize these sounds, but attempts to locate the self within their milieu, pinging old memories and tracing them forward to the present. What bodily response does a busy tone prompt? What old tension or melancholy does it dredge up in the nervous system?" – Pitchfork (8.0)

"If Mise En Abyme places Cousin in the void, he's using his time there to register his own humanity and strengthen his resolve, making sense of the world through selective erasure and curation." – Exclaim

"Utilizing rough recordings of female friends singing and talking, and sampled sounds from his childhood (video games, home movies), French-Canadian producer Jean Cousin creates a profoundly sad and affecting collage of memory and longing, ghostly torch songs half-buried in the claustrophobic electronic clatter of the modern world." – Mojo

"Cousin is one of those electronic musicians capable of writing unexpected emotion out of his sounds. His source material frequently comes from the captured voices of his friends, whether that be snippets of conversation, readings of texts or harmonic, wordless singing, all of which are then processed and placed sensitively amid a supporting infrastructure of electronic rhythms, glitches and snatches of non-melodies." – Electronic Sound

"Another fantastical collage from Joni aka Jean Cousin… The overall effect of the album is multi-fold, entering the ears on many levels and pleasing as it puzzles." – Vanguard Online