JOYFULTALK
From a secluded outpost on Nova Scotia's mystical South Shore, junked-analog project JOYFULTALK conjures micro-climate trance music. The brainchild of instrument builder and alchemist Jay Crocker, JOYFULTALK offers up instrumental compositions of analogue tongue that flow like wordless rivers and glitching fields of electric grass through a bric-a-brac vocabulary of handmade electronics. Crocker's music channels a sonic regionalism influenced by the craggy treelines and flowing rivers of Lunenburg county, with gnarled jamscapes rendering natural spaces in a hazy parallel universe, navigating the astral plane by way of his rugged maritime environs; tinkered lightfields of forward motion in a maniac's grove.

After a fabled career as an avant-improv regular and go-to homespun producer in Calgary throughout the early aughts, Crocker relocated with his family to a grandiose, piecemeal residence tucked into the treeline along the Petite River in Crousetown, a blink-and-you-miss-it Nova Scotia hamlet, in 2011. Without a social outlet or music community to partner with, Crocker began inventing his own musical partners (The Pink Dolphin, The Cheadle): a cast of modded synths and cobbled instruments to help elicit his sense of creative unbalance. The resulting sonic conversations became 2016's MUUIXX, JOYFULTALK's acclaimed debut full-length (released on the essential and adventurous Drip Audio label) - a record lauded for its unlikely Cluster-meets-RZA micro-grooves.

Following these smatterings of high praise, various Canadian and European live dates alongside such acts as Micachu & The Shapes and Holy Fuck, a couple of home plumbing jobs, some gnarly car repairs, the creation of the Planetary Scoring System (Crocker's own conceptual scoring methodology) and the construction of BIBELOT (a custom-built, gallery-ready set of sixteen ceiling-mounted music boxes), JOYFULTALK released its second full-length offering Plurality Trip on Constellation in August 2018, teaming up with multi-instrumentalist Shawn Dicey (Ox, Lab Coast) to craft the record's otherworldly sounds. Plurality Trip is an extension and refinement of the duo's junkshop practices, drawing from contemporary dark trance and techno, while rooted in the outré swamps of krautrock and the refracted webs of noise and dub. Heady and skitteringly kinetic, Plurality Trip unfolds like a fever dream shot through with dappled forest light and darkening skies.

JOYFULTALK will be releasing its third album, A Separation Of Being, in March 2020. This new LP employs hints of Japanese environmental music, enveloping polyrhythms, and new minimalism, resulting in Crocker's most focused and dazzling album to date. Based on a massive, prismatic visual score now housed by the Art Bank Of Nova Scotia, A Separation Of Being is guided off the page by a collection of homemade instruments and animated by a majestic string arrangement written by Crocker and performed by Polaris and Juno winner Jesse Zubot (Tanya Tagaq, Destroyer).
Contact
Label: Constellation Records
Rare Earth
  • ARTIST: JOYFULTALK
  • TITLE: Rare Earth
  • CAT#: BKWRD029
  • FORMAT: Digital
  • RELEASE DATE: January 14, 2022

Originally a video project commissioned by the Everyseeker festival, JOYFULTALK's Rare Earth is a warped dub single adorned with sampled sewing machines and a layer of haze.

This project is a collaboration with JOYFULTALK mastermind Jay Crocker and his wife, textile artist Johanna Hayes. A forest installation of improvised textiles, live reconstructions of sewing machine songs, and motorized choirs of new campfire drones emptied into the depths of night.

“akin to walking blindfolded into an indoor bird sanctuary”Queen City Sounds and Art

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