"A tropical fish yearns for snow", on Other Joe's 'Flawless'

I’ve been friends with Joe since we were kids. He is a profound silence filler.

“I can’t be long alone with this,” he says, pointing two fingers to his temple with a wink.

Before his 9-5, he watches niche NBA TikToks through waterproof headphones in the shower. When waiting for a coffee, he prepares and rehearses one-liners in his “noggin”. He reads pulp detective novels while walking through office corridors.

“I’m gamifying Goodreads”.

He devises M. Night Shyamalan plot twists in the day’s pauses. His life is a movie. “My life is a movie”. He grieves his Chess.com ELO. When we play on a basketball team together, he wonders out loud whether or not he will ever be “that guy”. But he’s always half-full. After we collectively miss every shot, he reassures me, “at least we have rich inner lives”. He’s extremely sentimental. He’s also very caring. He doesn’t mind thinking more of himself and more of others. He’s liable to romanticise the act of simply hanging out. And that’s an uplifting quality to be around.

Joe’s second album, Alien Haze, begins with the sound of him walking, a pedestrian crossing ticking, and then the sound of vigorous knocking on and opening of a door to what the listener imagines is a friend’s house. Then, his voice, large and bright, saying, “it’s Joe”. I think about that opening when listening to all of Joe’s releases because in each there seems to hover a similar announcement “of being me”: a confidence perforated with the riddle of its own construction; some sombre questioning of the musician who names themselves the maker of music; and a lasting question of the person enraptured by the brashness of their own self-narrativisation. “I want to be the next Jamie xx”.

There’s a celebration of being Joe, welcoming and earnest. But there is consciously something extra, forlorn and effacing, offered before the music begins. Othered, Joe tells me about the story of his moniker—about working at a bar alongside a better-looking, more charismatic (a tall order), and cooler dude, also called Joe. Beyond an anecdote to fill the space of coming up with an origin, this feeling—feeling secondary, feeling ordinary, feeling like a proxy for someone else—is instead commemorated and consigned to his artistry, the conditions of this hierarchy becoming a symbol for his music.

“What if... I’m just another guy making beats…” and then the but… “but what if… the underdog still has that dog in him”? “What if… the beats are nonetheless beautiful?”

Names are important, and Joe’s name makes him a placeholder for greatness.

Joe Schmoe, I run you row, it rains it snows, it schmoves, it schmelts, & it schtruggles beneath the weight of its own everydayness to schmooze its way into your open heart.

If, like Plain Jane, Other Joe implies a placeholder for a common body, what kind of sentiment (offered with self-awareness) is expressed in a name that evokes not just an allness but a nothingness too? I’m an everybody and a nobody at the same time. There is some distorted dream here that feels foreign among small poppies. And so it is couched in the irony of plainness. I’m normal, but I’m not. How could you be normal, I wonder of my friend, making music that is frequently exquisite? Music that continually attempts to refer to its maker, unnameable and unspeakable in words, let alone 4/4, deliberately exposed to the listener and deliberately withheld beneath the impressiveness of his album’s surfaces.

Be me: writes the 2014 anon. A starter pack for true Joeness begins with the montaged imagery of his music videos: vertical snapshots from his camera roll that render his friends and his own image, moved by a documentation of their own nostalgia. Waves at St Kilda beach, the minutiae of an incidental and plundered internet, the group chat, gumtrees and his smiling mum, stages and instruments and good times from a collective scene—behind it all, the deeply affecting soundtrack of long quivering notes breathed out from Joe’s saxophone.

Why is it sad? Is it sad because it’s over—irreputable history?

The mixture of joy and longing and being whimsical, and also uncommonly and pointedly wise, is the Other Joe “emotional umami”. Like returning to the “memories” tab of your photo app, on Joe’s latest album 'Flawless', the emotional excess of static chord progressions, fronted by carefully blocked-out and restrained melody, return as the criers of this complex feeling. Joe’s craft is on display. These are the most refined tracks I’ve heard him produce. Their ambition is turned inward. The tender swell of a new pad occurs at the opportune moment. The drum programming is gorgeous and reveals new details on every relisten. Soft brushes, accelerating fills, click-clack panning, criss-crossing delays that fit like Jenga—Joe’s rhythmic complexity always remains accessible yet exposes the nuance of its composition upon careful examination. A high-pass filter is prudently executed and nods to its genre without being beholden to its formula. A moment of silence before introducing a disjunct bass line is orthodox on paper, but resourceful here.

“A tropical fish yearns for snow”, Joe tells me. Wanting what you can’t imagine. Wanting the very thing that would make your life inhospitable. I wonder how this platitude sounds within the renunciation of imperfection. ‘I Run This City'; 'Ice In My Veins' (think basketball celebration); 'Flawless'—with these track names, Joe’s tongue is in his cheek, but also it’s kind of not? He’s humming MIDI lines in Barkly Square, not Madison Square Garden. You can’t yearn for something unimaginable if you feel perfect and total. A tropical fish is shimmering and content with its warmth. In prior releases, the details and construction of Joe’s sonic palette are built upon what could be called a digital yearning. An “e-yearning”—to plunder a prior Other Joe album title, ‘blessings from the eheart.’

The e-heart, like an e-girl, I think, is the one that beats within a shell-like persona constructed from the signifiers of an internet you only ever were a proxy to. Echoed in the name of Joe’s pivotal record label ‘.jpeg Artefacts’, his own work is equally fascinated with the production of emotional and digital artefacts produced by the “process” of consuming, remembering, and codifying everyday life. Take not the black pill but the “lavender pill” and find yourself moved by Joe’s curatorial mind, the giggling splattering of the viral Peanut Butter Baby, or the ripped sounds of a bizarre masked man called CatDad, which rest distorted and malformed in the composition of Joe’s “ambient” music. Ambient artefacts come from his own life too—repurposed here cleverly, tragically, joyously. iPhone recordings, voice notes, the sounds of his friends and lovers laughing, jamming, yelling, speaking to him between recording sessions and valuing his company.

So it is that the genetics of the above sentiment and its composition are present in ‘Flawless’. Still, on this album, such conceptual interest is instead tasked towards an uncomplicated enjoyment. The music is faster and clearer. The method of the song remains its songness. There aren’t any formal plot twists, rehearsed in the empty parts of the day. But something is missing—a place where an Other Joe-head might imagine the position of his saxophone. On prior work, it is this dry saxophone playing, responsible for a movement in your chest, that emerges selectively as a motif for recollection—of him? We hear his inhalations. In ‘Flawless’, an album composed for a stage, the crescendoing sax is instead hidden beneath layers of reverb to become synth-like “gasping” pads.

I’m reminded of an early image that has surrounded his work: a body of water ripped from a YouTube video, zoomed in upon until the artefacts of its codec make the light upon its surface into glowing, unreal stars. There is a phrase to describe this play of sunlight upon water from Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound, ἀνήριθμον γέλασμα—“infinite laughter.” Joe’s sounds capture that feeling, music that laughs for you. Music that knowingly requires two parts: a compositional body, and the emotional tenor of its artefacted observer. When the opening track, ‘the Air through my fingers’ nearly ends, we are left in the wake of that feeling: a smile, a long sigh, a breath out. Finally, as if to remind us that the ice remains beautifully tarnished and melted, in ‘Ice in my Veins (feat. CTP)’, the concluding track of the album, we are left with a fake ending, silence, and then in a manner that brings to mind the Other Joe project, a final ambient reprise. These “secret” pads (sampled from Drake and Future’s “wait for U”) announce a chord change, unheard before, a sincerity and vulnerability that epilogue the bravado.

Joe writes:

It’s okay to hear the labour in the joke and the labour involved in its honesty. Drawing energy from this sentiment—a self-deprecation that is refused by the statement of making beautiful music—the moniker that evokes being everybody and nobody is not reflected in its music.

Here, what is sentimental remains the ever present and profound “what if” of a good song: “what if, at the end of this party/night/moment between friends or lovers we not only kissed a billion times but also heard in our unassuming place a piece of music that moved us in a way we hadn’t felt before?”

“What if, when driving through the summer rain of southside Melbourne the song actually felt alive and resonant with the feelings of being me.”

Joe carries himself with a generosity and warmth outside the music. He has cultivated a community around a scene of ambient music that often sidesteps the pretences of its genre. A community that can be funny, loud, and honest about making quiet music. His label is much loved, and when he says goodbye to you, he never fails to say his parting leitmotif, “bless, much love” like he’s “lowkey countercultural”, or on stage. But also because he has love to give. In his work as an engineer, he has mastered and mixed half the scene, often upon the promise of “vibes” alone. Which I guess makes him quite philanthropic and even big-hearted.

Perhaps the love should be returned to this album, not ‘Flawless’, but thoughtfully without flaws.

JOE: it's a post from the r/cigarettes subreddit. "chilling at the beach thinking about my life mistakes and how unlucky i am", with a pic of the guy smoking a cig at the beach. i think this type of vibe has the umami... it's like pathetic, but also very funny, quite vulnerable too. probably if im being honest i really identify with like, smoking an emo cig and just feeling so catastrophically sorry for yourself to the point of parody. there's another good one with a guy smoking a cig with the caption "mom's on some fuck shit again". i put it as the cover photo to pay my respect to those dudes and those moments.

JOE: At least once a week…

JOE: ahahahah yeah I think so. My earliest musical touchstones were these very sentimental indie bands - the National, Sufjan Stevens, etc. Our music is nothing alike, but I think you can hear those indie rock sort of chord progressions in my tunes too - very wistful and yearning.

I worry that I’m sentimental to the point of being saccharine at times. Sometimes I feel the need to try and cut that or subvert that in other ways so it doesn’t get too cloying.

JOE: I have this track called ‘I Was That Book’, where there’s a piano moment about halfway through. It wasn’t working in the original demo, the track was too pretty and it went for too long. I had heard that master perfumiers put a whiff of vomit into their sweetest scents, a small ugliness that gave it ok even more beauty by contrast. I overlaid a field recording of a buzzsaw and hammer over the piano and immediately the track worked and felt refined.

Now I think I do that quite a lot, putting the vomit in the perfume, the buzzsaw over the piano.

JOE: Not explicitly. I think 'Flawless' has those contrasts, but they’re more subtle. Back then I didn’t know how to use a DAW, I have more tools in my toolchest now.

JOE: I started doing those big master bus delay and filter sweeps on my record Jealousy Tulip - I’d say Flawless is a part 2 of sorts to that record. Those tracks on Jealousy Tulip are more unwieldy and chaotic, it feels a bit like the wheels might come off at any second. Now I am a bit better at producing and I have better systems that are a bit more refined, the sweeps and sends give structure to the songs. The tracks are basically loops with lots and lots of automation.

JOE: ahahahaha maybe. When I say my process is becoming more refined it’s not because I have become like, a genius producer. I think I’ve just become more comfortable with the producer that I am, if that makes sense.

I’m not like, extremely techy with how I’m making things, the process is actually quite flawed - lots of AI stem artefacts and nasty parallel compression, 192kps mp3 samples, things out of key, etc. I used to worry about that, it’s the only way I really knew how to make music, and I stressed that my music didn’t sound like anyone else's, and maybe that made it bad or whack. Now I feel stoked that I have this sonic language that feels like it belongs to me.

In a way, I guess it’s like, there are countless flaws in the tracks, but that’s what makes them uniquely mine. I’m cool with the flaws - maybe that makes them Flawless?

JOE: I have some shows coming up. I will probably go visit my friend Nico in London and try and play a couple shows while I’m there. Will release some new stuff later in the year.

Mainly, importantly, I will keep making music and trying to get props for making it. Love making music… love getting props. Very important to me. Life affirming.

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Emile Frankel is a writer, composer & researcher. Find his work via