Joni Void - Everyday Is The Song
Everyday Is The Song is Joni Void’s third album for Constellation and a deeper plunge into emotive audio montage; the Montréal-based French-British producer defines it as “Tape Vortex / Musique Verité / Memory Collage”. The album’s raw material relies centrally on a Walkman bought at local 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.
Everyday Is The Song is an evocative sample-based sonic diary brimming with warmth, transience and hyper-specificity where Void explores a more abstract and interstitial terrain of drifting miniatures. Joni Void describes it as “music about music”, citing the experience of an “earworm” as an intangible way that music can appear in the everyday.
Songs are 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. As Joni Void says “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.”
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 interiority on their previous pair of acclaimed LPs, Void’s new album flows with intentional lightness and a more incidental atmosphere.
Joni also cites two “beloved” rappers, R.A.P. Ferreira & Pink Navel, as some of the main influences behind making the next musical project lighter, poetic and more hopeful, through the self-proclaimed “love, soul, agency, and whimsy” virtues of their collective Ruby Yacht. “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.”
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 (in addition to the cover for Joni’s Retrospective tape) - "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 symbol has been something Joni relates to for a long time, and is also a shot which appears in Mind Game.
Everyday Is The Song remains perhaps broadly melancholic in temperature, but marks a turn away from angst, agitation, despondency or despair for Joni Void. Instead, its subjectivity imbues the quotidian with affecting narrative, understated wonder, and a wholly engaging serenity.
