Joni Void
Every Life Is A Light

Joni Void returns to songcraft on their warmest and most welcoming record yet, where the acclaimed sampledelic Montréal producer chills out with an emotionally resonant song cycle tinged by downtempo, lo-fi, avant-pop, and trip-hop.

Guests include Japanese musicians Haco and Ytamo, Canadian artist Sook-Yin Lee, Pink Navel, and N NAO.

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 Cibo Matto. One of Void’s greatest hip-hop loves, internet rapper 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 with breakbeat of “Event Flow”, are perhaps most overtly ‘lofi chill’. Indeed the whole album could be said to sit adjacent to those viral (if not already AI-generated) genre trends, which maybe begs the question on a lot of our minds: can specificity and authenticity of musical materials still be heard, still meaningfully signify substance and difference, still matter? Perhaps a question that fades in comparison to the career break Void could catch by landing on generic streaming playlists. More likely, these tracks remain too off-kilter, too genuinely lo-fi and ineffable, and too disqualified by the status of its peasant rights-holders, to catch the algos. Context remains the poor cousin of content.

Meanwhile Void marches on, as a tireless organizer of local music events, bouncing around and often living in DIY venues, depending on the latest apartment displacement. With an ubiquitous polaroid camera in tow, they also document each communal happening with a single shot (and often a blinding flash bulb): a memory and metaphor for lives illuminated preciously, singularly, ‘imperfectly’ in the moment. Dozens of these polaroids adorn the album’s back cover and inner sleeve art in grid-like montages, as a fitting analog for the careful construction, grainy intimate materiality, and ephemeral feeling of these songs. 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. 

PACKAGING NOTES

CREDITS

(Adapted from the album's liner notes)

Edited, produced, and directed by Jean Néant/Joni Void.
 

"Everyday - A Sequel" samples Omoide Hatoba – Marine Show. 

"Du Parc" samples Wouter van Veldhoven – A head stuck in tapes 6 + Yoshio Ojima – Esplanade (Live) and features N NAO on vocals.

"Time Zone" features HACO on vocals.

"Cloud Level" features Ytamo on vocals, organ, steel pan & piano, Sarah Pagé on harp, and samples Yuka Honda – You Think You Are So Generous But It’s The Most Conditional 'Anything' I’ve Ever Heard.

"Muffin - A Song For My Cat" features Muffin on vocals, Alex Brooks on piano tape loop, and samples 25,000 Kittens – Hanakichi + RRFFDD – Should Be More Excited.

"L’Empire des lumières" features Ida Toninato on outro vocals, and samples Hanayo – Kimigayo + Hiroshi Sato – Doncama + Tatsuya Nakatani – Uncovering Essence. 

"In-Between Places" samples Lali Puna – Faking The Books + Shibata & Asuna – Color Pop Okinawa + Pizzicato Five – The World’s Spinning at 45 R.P.M. + a snippet from The Devil & Daniel Johnston (2015).

"Event Flow - A Sequence" samples Alanis Obomsawin – Bush Lady + Ben Brown & Roxanne Nesbitt – Bowls + Les McCann – Sometimes I Cry.

"Story Board" features Pink Navel on vocals, and samples Christophe – Da-Da Song + Ze Frank – Notes on Friendship.

"Vertigo" features Sook-Yin Lee on vocals, bass & drums and samples Vangelis & Irene Papas – Little Orange Tree.

"Death Is Not The End" samples Yumi Matsutōya – Story Of Giacobini's Comet + Mœbius & Plank – Solar Plexus.

"Joni Sadler Forever" features Joni Sadler on drums, and samples Louise Forestier – La Douce.

Mastered by Simon Lancelot.
 

BLESSINGS / THANK YOU

My feline soulmate Muffin / Bill Goops (2003-2024). My Lover Kasha Chang - You are the Light of my Life. My special album Collaborators. My dearest Friends: José Lobo, Quinton Barnes, Soledad Rosas, Masaaki Yuasa. Family & Friends of Joni Sadler. All the venues I live in. Snicket the Cat. Don, Ian, & all of Constellation Records. & You, whoever you might be !

 To all the Friends, Family, Pets & Places no longer with us - This is for your Light in our Lives.

We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Québec, the Government of Canada and Canada’s private radio broadcasters.
Nous reconnaissons l’appui financier du gouvernement du Québec, du gouvernement du Canada et des radiodiffuseurs privés du Canada.