DANI JOSS

A single half hour. One tiny half an hour. Thirty minutes. A lot can happen in such a short amount of time. Sometimes it doesn’t take more than one second, one glimpse of an eye and your life can change drastically. Imagine the importance, the effect of such a moment. An accident, a terrible mistake or just a coincidence that fuses all emotions, thoughts and dreams into on indefinitely dense core and then releases the immense tension in one big bang. A turning point, the edge of a deic knife cutting deep into the lines of fate. A point in time where everything that has ever happened to you will be divided by, in before and after. Things like that happen.

The music on “liquid photography”, provided by Dani Joss, is all about the complete opposite. About the moments in life when nothing at all happens. When life takes a pause and steps out into the backyard to take a smoke and watch the stars in the cold, black nightly sky. In the short text printed onto the inside of this CD Joss writes that he produced this music “in a state of letting go, in an effort to bear no grudge whatsoever”. Seems to me as if he stopped watching the dark ocean at night from the beach and started wandering into the waves to see how far he could go until the sea would start to suck him in.[1] An endless calm and peace sipping through the clothes and into the bones, cold and firm, yet releasing and liberating.

Caught in an esoteric dreamworld, drifting somewhere in the grey yet comfortable world between being awake and sleeping soundly, Dani Joss adds carefully constructed sounds onto each other. The minimalist stasis of softly twirling keys e.g. during “balloon / honest mistakes” sound like the soundtrack to watching the movements of tiny sea-animals dancing in front of a blackened screen and shining from within by fluorescence. Then it is layers of slowly waving synthesizers backened with almost audible tides of white noise. There is only one track that offers a rhythmical element vaguely reminding of drums: the third part of “part / falldown / everlasting sadness / part (reprise)”, though the distorted western e-guitar banging Morricone-like spaghetti-tunes (or whatever might fit that description under these circumstances) for about 30 seconds at the end of the track is the definite highlight.

In the middle parts of the record Dani Joss starts to use traditional instruments, that are just minimally distorted, for instance wallowing in the self-produced vibrations, echoes and overtone-modulations produced by a classical piano recorded with a contact-mic. The same kind of solitude and beautiful monotony so deeply explored by Sylvain Chauveau, but here opening up different doors, that it will never stop to amaze me how apt musicians still find new ways to play these old instruments. The feeling arising from that track is perfectly described by its name: “two ex-lovers staring at each other. Knowing they’re going in different directions. Breeding a false sense of hope.” A little piece of poetry, that. The last track, “love interrupted / BREAK! / fin” moves into heavily electronic areas. With pounding basses subdued somewhere in the back but providing a steady backdrop to the irritant beeps of a medical machine and distorted screeches, before starting into something perfectly fitting for a postmodern second-world-war submarine-movie. And then ending into a multilayered spectacle of heavily distorted keyboard sounds, longwinded and screeching, like Black to Comm or Fibla.

[1] He might be a soulmate to late Townes Van Zandt, who, though from a completely different place musically, was prone to such experiments. One time he leaned back while sitting on the railing of a balcony just to experience what the moment of tipping over would be like, if he could feel the exact point of time when there was no way he could ever get back on the balcony safe again. He recounted that he was perfectly clear about the fact, that, to experience that, he would have to fall down from the balcony and finally he did, third floor, if I remember correctly. He didn’t get hurt, didn’t even spill the bottle of wine he was holding. What a story to tell late at night…

DANI JOSS Liquid photography CD, poeta negra

With this release the record label really makes its name ring true: black poetry. “as if incompatibility was trying to communicate the obvious to me” writes Dani Joss in the inner sleeve notes as well as “I’ll go to sleep now. If you don’t mind”, which describes the state of mind of his while producing this music and the music itself as well. As careful as Joss is constructing his minimalistic soundbits, as much does he like to put them together with as much contrast as possible without destroying the piece completely. Joss finds his roots with legends like Coil or Controlled Bleeding, but also drops the names of Sigur Rós and Pan American (or at least the label does). All you have to do is to close your eyes and fall into this trap. Have nice dreams.
A single half hour. One tiny half an hour. Thirty minutes. A lot can happen in such a short amount of time. Sometimes it doesn’t take more than one second, one glimpse of an eye and your life can change drastically. Imagine the importance, the effect of such a moment. An accident, a terrible mistake or just a coincidence that fuses all emotions, thoughts and dreams into on indefinitely dense core and then releases the immense tension in one big bang. A turning point, the edge of a deic knife cutting deep into the lines of fate. A point in time where everything that has ever happened to you will be divided by, in before and after. Things like that happen. The music on “liquid photography”, provided by Dani Joss, is all about the complete opposite. About the moments in life when nothing at all happens. When life takes a pause and steps out into the backyard to take a smoke and watch the stars in the cold, black nightly sky. In the short text printed onto the inside of this CD Joss writes that he produced this music “in a state of letting go, in an effort to bear no grudge whatsoever”. Seems to me as if he stopped watching the dark ocean at night from the beach and started wandering into the waves to see how far he could go until the sea would start to suck him in.[1] An endless calm and peace sipping through the clothes and into the bones, cold and firm, yet releasing and liberating. Caught in an esoteric dreamworld, drifting somewhere in the grey yet comfortable world between being awake and sleeping soundly, Dani Joss adds carefully constructed sounds onto each other. The minimalist stasis of softly twirling keys e.g. during “balloon / honest mistakes” sound like the soundtrack to watching the movements of tiny sea-animals dancing in front of a blackened screen and shining from within by fluorescence. Then it is layers of slowly waving synthesizers backened with almost audible tides of white noise. There is only one track that offers a rhythmical element vaguely reminding of drums: the third part of “part / falldown / everlasting sadness / part (reprise)”, though the distorted western e-guitar banging Morricone-like spaghetti-tunes (or whatever might fit that description under these circumstances) for about 30 seconds at the end of the track is the definite highlight. In the middle parts of the record Dani Joss starts to use traditional instruments, that are just minimally distorted, for instance wallowing in the self-produced vibrations, echoes and overtone-modulations produced by a classical piano recorded with a contact-mic. The same kind of solitude and beautiful monotony so deeply explored by Sylvain Chauveau, but here opening up different doors, that it will never stop to amaze me how apt musicians still find new ways to play these old instruments. The feeling arising from that track is perfectly described by its name: “two ex-lovers staring at each other. Knowing they’re going in different directions. Breeding a false sense of hope.” A little piece of poetry, that. The last track, “love interrupted / BREAK! / fin” moves into heavily electronic areas. With pounding basses subdued somewhere in the back but providing a steady backdrop to the irritant beeps of a medical machine and distorted screeches, before starting into something perfectly fitting for a postmodern second-world-war submarine-movie. And then ending into a multilayered spectacle of heavily distorted keyboard sounds, longwinded and screeching, like Black to Comm or Fibla. There is the danger of thinking that Dani Joss might be a great discoverer of sounds and of ways to produce or treat sounds, but that he is less of a composer, because, aside from attributing the different parts of his tracks with different names, the distance between them is often quite big and their connections quite harsh at times. But on repeated re-listening the connections become clear, the ideas sipping from one part into the next become obvious and the lines between them organic. These changes also make “liquid photography” more listenable than the truly academic work of, lets say, Kaffe Mathews, or the drone-noise of John Hegre and still an exciting and refreshing experience. [1] He might be a soulmate to late Townes Van Zandt, who, though from a completely different place musically, was prone to such experiments. One time he leaned back while sitting on the railing of a balcony just to experience what the moment of tipping over would be like, if he could feel the exact point of time when there was no way he could ever get back on the balcony safe again. He recounted that he was perfectly clear about the fact, that, to experience that, he would have to fall down from the balcony and finally he did, third floor, if I remember correctly. He didn’t get hurt, didn’t even spill the bottle of wine he was holding. What a story to tell late at night…

CD, poeta negra