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JOYFULTALK
Plurality Trip
Constellation - 2018
Michael Panontin
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Jay Crocker is one of the more interesting composers of electronic music in Canada these days. So the fact that he has found his way onto the impressive roster of talent at Montreal's Constellation label should surprise no one.
As JOYFULTALK, the Nova Scotia-based Crocker issued his debut full-length MUUIXX about three and a half years ago. That disc, on the east coast Backward Music, was a virtual feast of electronic sound that ran the gamut from dreamy Cluster grooves to sinewy glitch and woozy industrial, all performed on his motley collection of cobbled-together instruments.
2018's Plurality Trip is equally impressive. On it, Crocker is joined on a couple of tracks by multi-instrumentalist Shawn Dicey, another Calgarian who, like Crocker, was smitten by the blissful isolation of tiny Crousetown, N.S. (but whose resume, oddly enough, is of a much more prosaic bent, with stints in alt-country band Ox and lo-fi rockers Lab Coast). It was Dicey, along with New Brunswicker William Vandermeulen, who first started accompanying Crocker on stage, bringing his hermitic leftfield recordings to life in real time.
In fact, the leaner, pared down sound on Plurality Trip seems to have grown out of the trio's early performances. "As we started touring, I had to solidify the sounds and how I was going to present the pieces live," Crocker explained to Luca Capone on Ryerson University's CJRU-AM. "Plurality Trip is sort of the whittled, sculpted version of the instruments I was using on MUUIXX. What you're hearing is for the most part full live performances. It's pretty much a live record."
Things kick off with the dirge-like 'Future Energy Fields I' and close with the similarly haunting 'Future Energy Fields II'. Inside these two bookends are tracks of varying intensity, like the eight-minute-plus 'You Death March' and the nearly-as-long 'Monocult', both of which crank up the sonic pyrotechnics to dizzying heights. These are remarkable to a degree, I suppose, but to these hoary old ears, it is the amazing 'Kill Scene', a wrenching piece of atmospheric krautrock that throws us back forty-odd years to the glorious, out-of-nowhere sounds of Harmonia's Musik von Harmonia, that makes Plurality Trip such a wonderful find.
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Constellation
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