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  • Constellation

The first widely-released album from French-born, Montréal-based artist Joni Void is a found-sound project that reflects the anxiety of cities.

Jean Cousin’s story to date has followed a typical 21st-century DIY-artist narrative. For the past six years, the Lille, France native has flooded his Bandcamp and Soundcloud pages with several self-produced albums. The first, soundtrack for a film that doesn’t exist, spelled out his m.o. in no uncertain terms; the second, still images & other dreams, provides a handy subtitle. And while Cousin assumed the sort of alias—Johnny Ripper—you’d expect of some bass-bin-rattling EDM deviant, his early music gently tiptoed along the porous borders separating post-rock, IDM, and modern classical, often sounding like a piano recital remixed by Boards of Canada. After moving to Montreal in 2012 to study film (a medium that informs both his music and visually enhanced live performances), he’s now found a natural home at Constellation Records. But if Constellation has given him the means to execute his first proper album release, Cousin is using the moment in the spotlight to make himself even more anonymous.

For his latest release, Johnny Ripper has been reborn as Joni Void, a nom de punk better than anything the creators of “Vinyl” could’ve come up with. But in the context of Selfless, it symbolizes absence as much as attitude. Where he once composed on piano, and even occasionally sang, Cousin approached Selfless as a purely found-sound project, with melodies and rhythms emerging from intricate editing rather than performed parts. The limited vocals we hear—spoken-word poems, guest raps, or even just breathing—were captured through field recordings or phone messages, a tactic that reinforces Cousin’s shadowy presence. At times, the malleable, corroded nature of his music yields to the crisply captured sound of Cousin manipulating his machinery, like the unseen wizard pulling levers from behind the curtain.

As he recently explained to Montreal’s CKUT: “The whole theme for the album was basically that it’s an out-of-body experience, through whatever means: music, death, psychedelics, just seeing some intense world news….” Cousin said that his intent is not to escape our troubled times, but to reflect and respect them—for him, now is not the time for introspection, but observation. After approaching his past records as soundtracks for films that didn’t exist, Cousin approaches Selfless more like a documentarian, outfitted with nothing but a dirty lens, decaying old film stock, and shaky hands to create, as one track calls it, “Cinema Without People.”

The opening “Song Siènne” serves to thrust Cousin from his hermetic, home-recording bubble into the world at large. At the outset, it’s a pretty but trembling piano piece, sounding not unlike Aphex Twin’s “Avril 14th” fed through The Disintegration Loops. But nearly two minutes in, the snowglobe serenity is abruptly shattered with what sounds like a hammer striking an anvil: the piano chords turn more intensely foreboding, the background is suffused with ambient street chatter, and suddenly the track acquires all the suffocating dread and confusion of feeling lost in a crowd in a foreign city where you don’t understand the signage.

But if “Song Siènne” evokes the anxieties of urban spaces, Cousin also playfully cuts through their tensions. On “Doppler,” he takes that most omnipresent city sound—a siren—and pitch-shifts it into, if not a full-blown techno track, then at least the blueprint for one. And as the record goes on, Cousin’s meticulous edits start to fortify into more robust rhythms: the aforementioned “Cinema Without People” is the album’s pulsating centerpiece, using the sound of a spinning film projector as the bedtrack for an oscillating, hypno-house throb. On “Abjection,” doomy drones are unleashed with industrial aggression, with Cousin stretching wordless voices into tortured wails and then snapping them back into nightmarish shrieks.

And yet as much as Selfless feels suited to soundtrack your next newsticker-induced panic attack, the album also functions as Cousin’s affectionate tribute to the Montréal DIY scene that encouraged him to perform live. A handful of tracks are given over to friends: “Observer (Natalie’s Song)” sets poet Natalie Reid’s plainspoken philosophies about social interactions to a swelling surge of clicks ‘n’ cuts; “Yung Werther (Ogun’s Song)” sees Tide Jewel spitting a voice-mailed invective about capitalism and police violence over a disorienting whirr of smashed glass, gunshots, and trap beats. But of the infinite sounds at Cousin’s disposal here, the most resonant are provided by Ayuko Goto (aka Noah) on “Empathy (Ayuko’s Song),” an analog-synth-smeared reverie from the late ’90s Warp playbook that’s propelled by her hushed whispers and panting breaths. Though its vocals are indecipherable, it’s the song that most clearly speaks to Selfless’ transcendent mission, hovering between the comforting intimacy of community and the unsettled essence of the outside world. And it’s a reminder that, even its quietest, most self-effacing moments, Selfless absolutely judders with physicality and viscera.

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