With everything speaks of itself, joão ms decisively steps out of the dream logic of his earlier work, presenting an album grounded in direction, structure, and presence, where sound no longer signifies sleep but asserts itself as waking reality.
Towards total presence
joão ms (then NOXIN)’s previous record titled dream sequence (Evel, 2022), was one of the rare actually surrealist artworks that I know of, alongside novels such as Cărtărescu’s Solenoid or Kavan’s Ice, namely portraits representing realistically the most unrealistic of human experiences: the dream state. Moving fluidly between the hyper-detailed sound design of “A little investment, a little gentrification,” the vast and sparse atmospheres of “You want to serve,” and the sample-like melodies of “Market forces” emerging in the steam like a mirage, the album was an uncompromising encyclopedia exploding (quietly) the phantasmagoria of sleep.
It is then extra striking that everything speaks of itself, his new album on 3OP, seems to leave behind the hypnagogic state straight away. A regular, steady tick grounds the opener, “bridge over tibre,” leading our way out of sleep and into a waking world — and the crossing is ecstatic. Over ten minutes, tuned percussion and fervent chords rise and intertwine in measured swells, with savvy composition and a sense of direction that (due to its content) was consistently avoided in dream sequence. When a syncope introduces the last third of the track, the jaw slacks, a knot forms in the throat. Personally, it’s easy to call this one of the most memorable and affecting pieces of music of the year.
While emotional peaks are reached again in different ways, this epic form and pathos are not repeated elsewhere — oddly, given how wonderfully they work. Instead, from here onward the album continues with pieces that are both essential in their propositions and radically exploratory, split between shorter tunnel-focussed compositions and longer, more meandering numbers. If tracks like “3curve” and “dub ergonomics” engage with specific features until their possibilities are exhausted (respectively, reversed-like synths growing around the obstacle of dry hits, and some sort of slomo hip-hop rhythm), the winding nature of “seven types of ambiguity” still manages to be groovy, and the tentative melodies of “raumplan dub” are sure to come up in the listener’s mind days after the event (with a smirk of satisfaction).
The triumph of self-evident sound ::
The album as a whole is in fact much more metaphysical than its predecessor, in describing and questioning the fundamental structures of music (and reality) with no need for the translated intermediation of dream, trying to design an architectural space where everything is and expresses itself and nothing else.
Forsaking metaphor for a second, the truth is that it’s exceptionally hard to talk about music that is able to present itself so purely as “just” music. Hearing and reading early comments about everything speaks for itself one can find adjectives like “organismic” and “mechanistic” alike, “blissful” and “uncomfortable,” technical software explanations and comparisons to other composers or producers. These are all true in some sense, and all beyond the point. In fact, this album does not need a large concept, or lyrics, or methodological constraints to justify its own existence amid a barrage of sounds: as a near-perfect piece of art — if perfection matters, if its absolute is worth holding as a concept — it speaks on its own and unmistakably for any attentive ear.
everything speaks of itself is available on 3OP. [Bandcamp]
