The new full-length from the Montreal-based French-British producer
Shares first single “Parallax Error” Featuring longtime collaborator N Nao
Album out 26th May 2023
Joni Void presents a new song cycle of emotive tape collage drawn from urban field recordings and sampling of transient performances, with audio capturing dozens of musicians in Void’s community, including Owen Pallett, Sarah Pagé, N NAO, Shota Yokose and YlangYlang.
The follow-up to their acclaimed 2019 album Mise En Abyme.
Featuring original cover art drawing by illustrator, Science SARU co-founder and anime legend Masaaki Yuasa.
Everyday Is The Song is an evocative sample-based sonic diary brimming with warmth, transience and hyper-specificity, where Void explores a more abstract interstitial terrain of drifting miniatures. The album relies centrally on a cassette Walkman bought at local Montréal record shop Death Of Vinyl in spring 2020 and lost at a Backxwash show two years later, but not before hours of audio snippets were captured and archived.
This album is Music about Music & how life oozes into sound. Songs that drive past you as they escape out a window. Earworms. A voyage—on foot, in a car, on a train, in the metro, a plane in the sky… Memory as a reel-to-reel, samples as stories. Drifting by like days & clouds. It’s an ode to loops & cycles. A chaotic fanfare of everyday life & passing time. An orchestra of subtle details & chance arrangements. Symphony of a moment.
– Joni Void –
Everyday Is The Song is constructed from audio recordings made all over and often while literally on the move: walking, cycling and skateboarding around the city; in bus and train stations; from car windows. The album’s overt musical material was recorded, often spontaneously and informally, in all sorts of jam spaces, living rooms and at local live shows. Perambulation is a central theme and constituent fabric of Everyday Is The Song, carrying with it a colloquial spirit of gentle, intrinsic sentimentality.
“One of the main themes is ‘motion of time’ and non-linearity, envisioning time as circular/cycles; and with different perceptions of speed, the world and time passing by – sounds are pitched up and down; slowed or fastened; bended/warped; moments from different points in time forming new songs, warbled into a vortex.” — JV
The album’s sonic travelogue through local audio geography and community conveys a sort of urban pastoralism and charming softness. Less kinetic and beat-driven than previous work, a field recording and audio art sensibility prevails, with a tempered intimacy that sends this new song cycle sailing along mostly dulcet but detailed waves of materiality. The result is an electro-acoustic tape collage album of beautifully drifting melody, occasional voice, wide-ranging ‘instrumentation’ and enchanting texture. Void’s deeply personal and keenly original aesthetic of assemblage and experimentation is on fine display, less burdened by forceful statement-making, but scrupulous, generous, and full of feeling.
As Sasha Geffen writes in their glowing 8.0 Pitchfork review of Joni Void’s last album Mise En Abyme (2019):“There is still experience that can’t be atomized and analyzed, however slippery it may be even to those feeling it; [Void] hunts that sensation of flux and liminality, unearthing warmth in a landscape of paranoia.”
Everyday Is The Song continues in this ineffable vein, but on an explicit mission to substitute psychosis with the ephemera of fleeting delight in observation, documentation, participation, the daily small acts of sharing, caring, enthusiasm and kindness of creative being-in-the-world. Relative to the more assertive and intensive tracks channeling explorations of traumatic inteliriority on their previous pair of acclaimed LPs, Void’s new album flows with intentional lightness and a more incidental atmosphere.
Joni cites two beloved rappers, R.A.P. Ferreira & Pink Navel, as a crucial influence: the self-proclaimed “love, soul, agency, and whimsy” virtues of their Ruby Yacht collective is a mission statement Void adopted for this new work—lighter, poetic and more hopeful. “Pink Navel in particular has made some of the most important music that got me through lockdown and grief. Their album Giraffe Track takes a similar time-travel concept to Mise En Abyme, but its dialogue with the past is a narrative of self acceptance, pure energy and child-like wonder” says Joni. “I suppose Everyday is The Song is my attempt at representing the whimsy.”
Everyday Is The Song remains perhaps broadly melancholic in temperature, but marks a turn away from angst, agitation, despondency or despair. Instead, Void’s subjectivity imbues the quotidian with affecting narrative, understated wonder, and a wholly engaging serenity.
Joni Void
Everyday Is The Song
180gLP / CD / DL
Constellation • CST173
Release date: 26 May 2023
TRACKLIST
Tape
Still-Life
Disposable
Non-Locality
Event Horizon
Negative Loop
In-Between Moments
Parallax Error (+N NAO)
World Is Spinning At 33 RPM
Vortex Any% Speedrun
Present Day Montage
Post-Credits Scene
Genre: Electronic, Ambient
RIYL: The Books, Susumu Yokota, Blithe Field, Ulla Strauss, pre-2010 Ninja Tune
Musician friends whose instruments, sounds and voices appear on the album include Owen Pallett, N NAO, YlangYlang, Sarah Pagé, Shota Yokose, Mojeanne Behzadi, Maya Kuroki, Moshi Moshi and Thoughts On Air to name just a few. The album’s title comes from Strawberry723, a Twitter bot that posted “Everyday Is The Song” on May 5th 2018 (the one-year anniversary of Void’s 2017 Constellation debut Selfless) and serendipitously invokes Void’s own long-running local event and micro-label platform Everyday Ago, itself taken from the Japanese-to-English auto-translate of a sentence about depression that yielded the phrase “I am being sad, everyday ago.”
The album cover was designed by Masaaki Yuasa, the first time the director has ever worked on artwork for an album (along with the cover for Void’s self-released Retrospective cassette): “to have artwork by Yuasa-san couldn’t be more life-validating for me” says Joni. “When I finished school and in my sabbatical year in 2011-2012 before moving to Montréal, I was crazy obsessed with Masaaki Yuasa’s psychedelic trip / bonkers anime Mind Game. It was the most life changing and therapeutic film; I watched it obsessively more than 60 times that year, almost like a tradition before going to sleep during some periods.” The ‘eye in the clouds/clouds in the eye’ has been a recurring symbol in Void’s album art, and an image which also appears in Mind Game.