ju ca, aka Justin Cantrell, carries on the mantle of cosmic hypnogogia, music made suspended in a timeless chasm of real memory and confabulation. Releasing his debut album Overture via Danish label Phinery on November 22, the Melbourne-based producer’s very name points to the ‘nowhereness’ of his sound: letters dropped out from his full given name to spell a fragment, a longing for something that was never there.
The album of ten tracks drifts lightly on this sense of loss and decay, with titles like ‘Wilt,’ ‘Fading of a Thought,’ ‘Fallen Angels’ and, of course, ‘Funeral Drone Pt I & II,’ here premiered on AQNB. A wandering space set loose in an afterworld of floating reverb and cosmic ambience, the music is reminiscent of the analogue electronica of Stellar Om Source, before shy, animated melodic cycles reach out to the lurid hyperreality of something like Oneohtrix Point Never‘s R Plus Seven tableaux.
Accompanied by a short text expounding on the hazard and potential of a ‘digital symbiosis’ in the compounding and fragmenting effects of shared information, the music accesses a certain visceral yearning for a thing made possible only by the internet era.**
ju ca’s Overture album is out via Denmark’s Phinery label on November 22, 2017.
