<p><span><span>- <strong>jpeg Artefacts </strong>label head and producer <strong>Joe Buchan</strong> has put his Other Joe hat on again. It’s time to spread a little end of year cheer and <em>blessings from th eheart</em>. </span></span></p>
<p><span><span>The same blissful eclecticism he fosters in the roster of his Naarm/Melbourne label, finds its way into the music he makes himself. In some ways it’s almost exactly the same, because once again he’s invited a lot of his musical friends and co-travellers to contribute to his rolling, expansive creation, including <strong>Nico Callaghan, R.P Downie, Ruby Wills, Steven Byth</strong> and <strong>Emile Frankel.</strong></span></span></p>
<p><span><span>Other Joe’s bowerbird sensibility is always hard at work, scavenging diverse sounds that catch his ear, be they “voice memos, Logic projects, iPhone videos and whatever else he could lay hands on”. That kind of field recording and found-sound collaging is well and good, but I think the more interesting aspect of his work is that he goes much wider than that.</span></span></p>
<p><span><span>Ambient music often prides itself on abstraction, an unsentimental abandonment of the more human elements of music. If Buchan’s archive did ever sound dry and digital, he’s made every possible effort to go in the opposite direction. He deploys the analogue warmth of his friends’ instruments -be it Nico Callaghan’s piano, Ruby Wills’ clarinet or Steven Byth’s sax- to send lifeblood pulsing through these long, slow, meditative narratives. It’s more than just the orchestration, too, it’s really the choice of genre: pushing with calm confidence out of ambient, through jazz and neoclassical and on into sounds that could be considered adult-contemporary and new age.</span></span></p>
<p><span><span>Where other experimental producers might fear to tread, Buchan is happy and at home and he has a right to be. If the organic elements save this record from artificiality, so too the subtle interpolation of samples and noise weave an uncanny weirdness through the work, removing any danger of this being safe, cheesy or simple. I think the name captures the feeling nicely: an overly-sentimental gesture trips over a typo into a weird but wonderful world of emotion, all pumped through a cybernetic organ: <em>blessings from th eheart </em>indeed.</span></span></p>
<p><span><span>- Chris Cobcroft.</span></span></p>
<iframe style="border: 0; width: 100%; height: 120px;" src="https://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/album=240119328/size=large/bgcol=ff…; seamless><a href="https://other-joe.bandcamp.com/album/blessings-from-th-eheart">blessings from th eheart by Other Joe</a></iframe>