"Behind Joyfultalk we find Jay Crocker, who sometimes works as Ghostkeeper and No More Shapes, but under this (new?) guise he works with homebuilt instruments and analogue treatments. This is more hobby-like music, I gather, as much of his other music deals with blues, jazz and neo-classical pop music. There is some sparkling joy and fun to be noted in the nine pieces on this release. I was thinking 'oh Drip Audio, well, improvisation' and to a certain extent there is indeed some level of improvisation to be spotted in here, but that's only a small portion of it.

Much of what he offers here doesn't sound like analogue treatments, but more like digital sampling of acoustic objects, such as a plucked bass sort of instrument in the opening piece 'Butterfly 12 Komokyo', along with some spacious electronics; it makes up quite a vibrant piece of music. Almost like dance music. Sometimes Crocker uses a lot of stereo separation, and that definitely disqualifies it for dance floor playback, but no doubt he's not after that, even when sampled rhythms play a big role in most of these pieces. Just as easily as he samples a cheesy rhythm in 'Cargo Face', he moves back to a deep dub bass in 'Gym Class' but overall one could as easily see the influence of electro-acoustic/musique concrete music in here, brought to you with a big grin on his face.

There is always that melody in there, sometimes up front, sometimes buried and sometimes chopped to pieces, but the objective doesn't seem to be to create some amorphous, abstract blurb of sound, but Joyfultalk wants to keep the 'song structure' alive in these pieces. This is a more than excellent work, combining a wide variety of interests and musical influences into quite an original work."Frans de Waard, Vital Weekly

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The Squid's Ear!