The world is full of frustrated artists sitting in their apartments, tooling away at proving that every voice has something to say. Just John is one of these anonymous artists.
JUST JOHN: Cubeworld Vacation (CD on Ampcast)
This release from 2001 features 51 minutes of homespun weirdness.
This music is quirky. It stems from a deep personal dissatisfaction with commercial tuneage, and what results is eclectic yet curiously engaging.
Electronic percussives batter away with joviality, while synthesized harmonies waft and weave on a wind that is designed by chance and produces a smiling relaxation. Whether guiding a computer to generate solid rhythms or scrape inner diodes and capture their edgy outcries, this stuff embodies a subdued minimalism, yet strives to reach beyond sparseness to achieve a melodic presence of oddity.
There is no common thread, and Just John refuses to stick to any one genre or mode, belting out tracks that can be annoying and appealing at the same time.
JUST JOHN: Ayatollah of Understatement (CD on Ampcast)
This release from 2001 features 62 minutes of continuing weirdness.
This time, Just John injects some lyrical content to his offbeat tuneage. Although sometimes consisting of straight recitations, these verbal communiques (present only on four of the sixteen tracks) are also delivered in over-treated crooned vocals intermingled with mildly locomotive harmonics.
There’s definitely more of a coherent melodic presence on this release, as the tunes evolve into idiosyncratic ditties that wrestle riffs from minor concepts and pursue the results like an exuberant dog in a summer meadow. Diverse synthetic beats are employed, forcing rhythms into play that goad the simplistic flow to rise and totter around like miswound toy robots.
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