Late 2018
More travelling with my pal Raymond, this time on a train that went on a boat, to Copenhagen’s lovely Mayhem spot. Big thanks to Danielle Dahl for the invitation, and the awesome mini hamburgers. Raymond and I also paid a visit, at long last, to the distant lands of Lithuania, and specifically to the AHEAD electronic music festival. Cheers to Vitalija Glovackyte for the hook up, to Edvardas Šumila and Dominykas Digimas for the wintry fun, especially the rather nifty afterparty in the old railway station.
It’s been a while since the last entry here, but not for want of work: hermetic noodlings on the next record and making weird art with NYU undergraduates have been the order of days. And there’s a fat load of work to be birthed in the immediate future, huzzah. First, the new record, definitively titled Joyrobix, is in the final stages of mixing, and it’s a carefully deranged half-hour song cycle that sounds like a commercial radio station loaded into a shopping trolley with children’s toys, a few of my uncle’s favourite adult contemporary records, my best Michael Bublé impression, and then kicked down a long flight of stairs. It’s really smooth until the wheels start to come off. Cheeky rough-mix snippet below:
Second, in a new and marvellous development, the fine folks of Berlin’s junge norddeutsche philharmonie have asked me to write a 30’, brightly coloured ode to Stravinsky’s Petrushka for performances next year. Among a bunch of other spots, it’ll be at the Philharmonic Hall in Szczecin, Berlin’s Konzerthaus and Hamburg’s Elbphilharmonie, all of which is in equal measures thrilling and terrifying. I’m thinking an abstract portrait of Igor’s little puppet as a heartbroken manic dude, with lots of vocoder. I’m also thinking of that Orchestra Hit sound from those keyboards we had at school. Mmhm, this one.
Finally, two homeboys have records out! You can get Michael Cutting’s beautiful tape machine studies here, and Laurie Tompkins’ explorations of the furthest reaches of Netflix and synth with cellist Ollie Coates, here. Rejoice!
joesna.pe 
