From a secluded outpost on Nova Scotia's mystical South Shore, the junked-analogue sounds of JOYFULTALK conjure micro-climate trance music. The brainchild of instrument builder and alchemist Jay Crocker, joined by multi-instrumentalist Shawn Dicey (Ox, Lab Coast), JOYFULTALK offers up instrumental compositions that flow like wordless rivers and glitching fields of electric grass, through a bric-a-brac vocabulary of handmade electronics. Their music channels a sonic regionalism influenced by the craggy treelines and babbling brooks of Lunenburg county, with gnarled jamscapes rendering natural spaces in a hazy parallel universe, navigating the astral plane by way of their rugged Maritime environs. Following a fabled career as an avant-improv regular and go-to homespun producer in Calgary throughout the early aughts, Crocker relocated 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 communit,, Crocker began inventing his own musical partners (The Pink Dolphin, The Cheadle): a cast of modded synths and cobbled instruments to salve his isolation and elicit his sense of creative unbalance. The resulting sonic conversations became JOYFULTALK's acclaimed 2015 debut full-length MUUIXX, (released on the essential and adventurous Drip Audio and Backward Music labels) - a record lauded for its unlikely Cluster-meets-RZA 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), listeners are now graced with Plurality Trip, the second offering from JOYFULTALK.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. Though heavier than its predecessor, the weight is never debilitating - Crocker and Dicey roam the shadows with rugged tones that reveal an expansive core. Pulled into a half-sped ghettotech mirage, woozy on new-age overdose, the listener may be lulled into a key-run reminiscent of Mahmoud Ahmed before eddying into a whirlpool of industrial jank. Heady and skitteringly kinetic, Plurality Trip unfolds like a fever dream shot through with dappled forest light and darkening skies. The result is a superbly idiosyncratic and invigorating take on avant-trance music with few comparisons. Thanks for listening.
