Joni Void - Every Life Is A Light

Montréal producer and sound collagist Joni Void returns with their warmest and most welcoming album yet, wedding their sampledelic songcraft to downtempo beats. Every Life Is A Light expands on Void’s stylistic turn towards mellower production (foreshadowed by the transitional ambient bricolage of their drifting experimental sound-art album from 2023) which now shapes more structured songs and even a pop embrace at times.

Every Life Is A Light swaps the twitchy insistence of Void’s acclaimed early albums for a newfound lightness and suppleness, with loops given more time and space to unspool, and rhythms filtered through the softer-focus lens of trip-hop and dub. The neurotic broken-machine kinetics of earlier Void is giving way to a comparatively head-nodding buoyancy, perhaps 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 alongside a wide community of musical guests. Japanese 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, while also attesting to Void’s longstanding relationship to Japan (where they have toured frequently) and Shibuya-kei. One of Void’s hip-hop loves, internet rapper Pink Navel, drops some brilliant verses on “Story Board.” The album’s two most spartan 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 most overtly ‘lofi chill.’ Indeed much of the album could be said to sit adjacent to this viral (if not already AI-generated) genre trend, which maybe begs the question on a lot of our minds these days: can specificity and authenticity of musical materials still be heard, still meaningfully signify substance and difference, still matter? Most likely, these tracks remain too off-kilter, too genuinely lo-fi and ineffable, and too disqualified by the inconvenient status of its flesh-and-blood peasant rights-holders, to catch the corporate streaming algos. Context remains the poor cousin of content. But Void carries on as an ever better conjurer of hauntological feeling.

On first single “Vertigo,” Canadian musician Sook-Yin Lee sings lead vocal (and plays bass and drums), with a tape loop and sinewy 80bpm groove propelled by psychedelically-layered lyrics that eventually turn the song in upon itself entirely: like Grace Jones’ “Nightclubbing” covered by Animal Collective?