Wow & Flutter 015 | MIDI Janitor
Jonathan Orr on dumpster diving, growing up on a commune, haunted synths, and community.
About a decade ago percussionist (among 200 other skills) Thor Harris left us with a list that made perfect sense for how to live, even if you weren’t living it. On occasion you run into someone who might be a poster boy for this list, and you see that hard-won purity seep through in their words, their work. Enter MIDI Janitor who reminds us to use the fucking library, and that plenty of good even great music is being made on the fringes without your closet of unused boutique synths.
W&F: Hi Jonathan! Looks like you're in Canada, is that correct? Tell us about home.
Jonathan Orr: I live in a neighborhood called Mount Pleasant in Vancouver, British Columbia Canada. My wife, my son, and our pug Gemma live in a condo behind a shopping mall called Kingsgate Mall, which has a place called Chai 69 with delicious hot dogs and home made butter chicken. They can also do your taxes. So that's good. The Neighborhood infamously has a park that we all renamed Dude Chilling Park. We changed the sign so often that eventually the city relented and it is now the official name. There is a really fun gang of local drinkers there called the “Brunch Bunch”. Recently the city started up a pilot project, allowing drinking in certain parks and since then they have grown themselves this beautiful ragged, rowdy, weirdly inclusive community.
It's beautiful what can happen when you just let people be. This is wildly tangential but it gives a nice sense of what the neighborhood is all about. Like a lot of Vancouver, there are very stark contrasts between wealth and poverty. I have worked on the front lines of the drug toxicity crisis in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside for over a decade so I feel as though I live in between two worlds. I spend a lot of time wandering the alleys of Mount Pleasant looking for bright silences. There's usually a good chair left there by somebody in a patch of light that you can sit on for a spell. I often find myself listening to recent mixes of tracks I have made while sitting on chairs like this.
The local Dairy Queen has these circular stone tables that I'm pretty fascinated by so I often have my morning coffee here. Mount Pleasant is dense with beautiful old trees, and there's one particular area that used to be a cherry orchard which has these really old gnarled cherry trees that are brain-breakingly beautiful when they blossom in the spring. I think for someone like myself who tries to spend as much time as possible outside Vancouver is the perfect place to live despite (or because of) its undeniably sorrowful undertow.
W&F: It seems like Canada has more arts funding and support for individual artists than the US. Have I created fiction here, are you a recipient of that support?
JO: I have zero experience with grants! I have not used any grant money directly, but I am in a pretty privileged place where music-making is more of a rite and ritual than a career, and I don't need to pay for life with it. I know that a lot of larger artists and labels fund projects and tours with grant money. I think this has changed a lot in the last five years as it has become easier to create these boutique, niche-focused record labels with easier access to distribution and sales and so avoid the grant writing slog.
The danger with grant money is you become caught in a funding trap and often end up guessing what will get that good good government money rather than focusing on what you're really into and putting out that improvised blackened gamelan doom LP on mini-disc knowing you will sell like max 18 of them. Hotham Sound is a great example of this as Jamie just puts out things that he loves and it shows.
The revolution will not be funded!
W&F: Your press bios mention using only a MIDI controller you found in the garbage— take us back to that day, why were you in the garbage?
JO: I know it's now a story that gets told every time, but it is still WILD to me. I had been talking to an old bandmate of mine about putting a project together and was thinking about the best way to do this. I thought that what I would do was get a new MIDI controller and start transcribing our old tracks to MIDI. This was at the beginning of Covid and it happened to be near my birthday. My wife asked me what I wanted for my birthday one Friday evening and I mentioned the idea of getting a cheap ass MIDI controller. The next morning I went downstairs to do the recycling and walked into our garbage room— and there leaning up against the dumpster was a dusty old E-MU X-board MIDI controller. At first, I thought she had bought it for me and was surprising me, but it was chipped and scratched and covered in dust.
So I brought it upstairs and plugged it into my laptop and it worked perfectly. I wrote the song “Luminous and Ashen” (off of my first tape Camp Peace) that afternoon on the couch.
I remember pulling out an old hard drive that had like a terabyte of music and films on it and dropping a recording of Angus MacLise’s “Solar Calendar” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7SugOjdZj0 into the sampler and just getting into it right way.
I haven’t stopped since then. And I haven’t used any other outboard gear. My friends think it is haunted and they might not be wrong because she seems to have a soul of its own. Perhaps IT is the MIDI janitor and I am the instrument. So yeah. I invented the character and concept of The MIDI Janitor the same afternoon. The initial idea was kind of ripping off something I heard once about the electro legend Egyptian Lover. I remember somebody telling me that he was initially a janitor at the recording studio he worked at and instead of getting paid he asked for studio time and made his legendary electro track “Egypt Egypt” that way.
I just concocted this idea of a janitor that worked in various places (like summer camps on the Camp Peace record) and made music in his supply closet. I mean, it wasn't too far off from reality as I was always making music in between my day job and dad job crammed into weird awkward spaces. It is a very hard thing to describe, but so much of the way I make things has to do with this kind of metaphysical permission. I had to make things quickly and didn’t have time to fuck with patching modular synths.
So signs, symbols, and coincidences are really important to me and this was one I could not ignore!
W&F: You're the MIDI Janitor, but while working through your catalog I started calling you CD ROM Custodian. Tell me about all the sounds and images you scavenge and that methodology.
JO: I love the CD ROM Custodian re-brand because I have used sounds from those for sure. My brother and I often talk about how much we loved the ambiance in this old CD ROM called Riven. I would often just stop playing the game and chill in a badly coded mountain pass listening to the digital wind. One of the main impetuses of the MIDI janitor project was to push back against this weird resurgence of musicianship and gear worship and synth hoarding in electronic music.
It just felt a bit heartbreaking to think that young people might feel they need all this stuff to make their music, and then never try because they couldn’t afford it. The reason I loved electronic music in the first place was that it was such a huge fuck you to capitalism in many ways. Especially the fact that black musicians in Detroit in the early days of hip-hop and techno who often couldn’t afford or gain access to studios and expensive gear or put together a full band could grab these cheap machines that mimic drummers, bass players, and orchestras and make this revolutionary music in their bedrooms.
So no wall of modular synths. Just the MIDI controller, my old laptop, Abelton, and the internet. But then again, that's probably giving me too much credit! I had to find a way to make music in between making dinners, walking dogs hustling on various side hustles and so I simply did not have the space, time, or money to have a more complicated setup so this became a way initially I could just make things. I am also really impatient whenever there are barriers put in front of creation. I really like to just dive in and then learn about things afterward. Or not.
I also have a lot of that record store clerk left in me where I just don't want to do things the way everyone else is doing them. So pushing back against a lot of that ambient New Age stuff with lots of noodling and soloing and fucking bird calls. I wanted to use the absolute shittiest samples and beats and sources that I could find. So I love using badly recorded early sampler CDs for example. So much of that early stuff has so much character and texture that it can really make a track come alive. I really wanted everything I made to sound like it came out on some council estate record label in outer Birmingham in 92’. I just love the ragged rush of all those early rave sounds. Suh buzz. For a while on Archive.org there was a collection of every 90s sampler CD but it got vaporized recently.
So often the way I make a track is by starting with the main chords which often have a lot of atonality and harmonics and detuning in them so I would then go and find some dumb beast of a beat to put behind it to counter the chord complexity and to create some grit and contrast. I would then build an instrument for the chord pattern by dropping sounds into the sampler and fucking with them. For example I used a lot of flutes from various library and commercial records and made signal chains with these.
So in exploring various archives and blogs and servers I built up a library of shitty old drum machines, toy synths, and other sonic detritus. Especially Casios. I adore Casios. Like a lot. In some way, they sum up everything I'm talking about. Largely forgotten, unloved and uncool and when you see a Casio synth or drum machine in a sampler it's basically just this one idiotic undifferentiated wall of sound. I really like idiotic undifferentiated walls of sound. Then I would often go looking for some scraps of vocals or voice or chants on sites like Ubu Web to add in. So like some fragment of dada poetry or shards of early musique concrete and just start layering and building out the track. Future Sound of London records were a huge inspiration for me on my most recent albums. Such an incredible mixture of lush as fuck sounds with dial up break beats.
W&F: When I was in high school, we had a required reading— On Dumpster Diving by Lars Eighner. Eighner writes "He begins to understand: people do throw away perfectly good stuff, a lot of perfectly good stuff. At this stage, Dumpster shyness begins to dissipate. The diver, after all, has the last laugh. He is finding all manner of good things which are his for the taking." Sorry, this interview is turning into full essay prompts, but go— what's the last laugh as the diver?
JO: I accept the prompt and will now proceed to tell a story that has nothing to do with anything musical at all, but which I find very funny. Many moons ago I used to work as a door-to-door canvasser for an environmental nonprofit. I was very poor and had barely enough money to eat. We would all go out canvassing in this trashed-out old van, and afterward, we would go and find dumpsters behind supermarkets that we knew were unlocked. Some of the dudes had been doing this for years and knew the best spots and when they would be throwing out recently expired food.
It was shocking how well we ate.
One time we got caught by a security guard, who came out from one of the supermarkets and told us to get out of the dumpster. We all sheepishly complied. Except for this one OG dude who remained in the depths of the dumpster. The security guard was actually pretty chill and explained to us the safety issues of being in the dumpster and that we should never do this again. At this point, my friend rose slowly from the dumpster and said in a very, very loud voice:
“Would you please be quiet? I am trying to nap!”
So the last laugh of the dumpster diver is the empowering realization that there are many ways to survive on the edges of late-stage capitalism. Also yogurt. Lots of free greek style yogurt.
W&F: What is your most compelling archive or thrifted find?
JO: I think I could probably write a little book or brochure about this. Maybe one of those little trifold diner menus. I think the all-time archive that I have probably spent the most time on which very sadly recently has gone dark is UbuWeb.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UbuWeb
It's almost panic-inducing how much astonishing art there is on there. Everything from very early japanese tape experiments and musique concrete to 70’s NYC spoken word and demented hippie cult free jazz workouts. There are a lot of little flickers and fragments of this audio throughout my work. The track Far Speak has vocal snippets from Japanese experimental tape recordings from the 50s that I found on there. Of course, the almighty archive.org is a website I probably spend way too many hours on still. In particular, it has an incredible collection of 1980s VHS company jingles and 90s sampler CDs that I scour on the regular.
I have also completely utterly pillaged Gescoms infamous Minidisc album. The beat in “Rudy Finds The Prism” from Bulk Order is built from Minidisc samples. I had so much fun trying to make these bits of brutalist electro noise work in my tracks. Slowing it down, cutting it up, reversing it and making instruments from it all. Go listen to it. Instead of buying cringe loops from Splice just go find your own shit!
W&F: Holy to Dogs feels like 1980's Thames Television children's themes (ie: Chocky, The Tomorrow People) meets Boards of Canada. It's visceral for me and I can see the wood paneled television in my childhood living room with an Atari on top. I am going to assume you might be in your 40s— how did your sound palette develop? Where did it start?
JO: I am deeply happy that this is what the album evoked for you. For me instead of a wood panel television, it was a giant reproduction of Dali's Christ of St. John of the Cross hanging in the communal dining room, and instead of an Atari, it was three druidic wells in a triangle encircling house and it was all set in rural Ireland in the 1970s growing up in a Christian commune.
So yeah. There's that.
Honestly, it relates more to landscape than direct musical influences. In Ireland, there's a concept of "thin places," where the barrier between the visible and invisible worlds is delicate and permeable. This idea has profoundly shaped how I create music. Liminality is a recurring theme in much of electronic music, and it makes sense to me that musicians drawn to this in-betweenness often create wordless electronic pieces to evoke a sense of indeterminacy. I mean, my middle name is Twilight and that really says it all. I could probably write a whole book about these experiences, but what’s essential regarding my relationship with sound and music is that I constantly strive to evoke the feeling of being caught between worlds. I work hard to ensure my songs shift through various moods in a short time, aiming to capture that essence of thin places, balancing on the edge of light and dark. This is why I’ve always been attracted to sounds that are warped and bent, like the late light of twilight bending over the earth as the sun disappears.
I remember my dad playing me the utterly unhinged psych folk records by bands like Incredible String Band, which is probably where my attraction to all things off-kilter and out of tune began. Later on, it was a lot of the post industrial groups like nocturnal emissions and Zoviet France (who I was completely devoted to) who created this charged alchemy from shitty consumer electronics melded with handmade instruments and field recordings of unloved places like nuclear power stations.
The truest lords of the thin places are of course Boards of Canada who no one will be surprised to hear, I am heavily influenced by. I think there are very few artists who have successfully created their own musical language and BOC’s language is the one I want to learn and speak above all. It’s always strange to me when people get caught up in whether being influenced by them is a copout. To me, it’s no different from performing a spell, incantation, or ritual. You use the same elements because you’re trying to invoke the same thing. Interestingly, it’s not often mentioned in discussions about them, but their music resembles the concept of persistence of vision in film. Your brain spends so much time resolving unresolved chords, unsuspending suspended 7ths, and smoothing out all the weft and warble that you’re literally remaking the music in your mind each time you listen.
I'm glad that Holy To Dogs sounds like a weird British television show. I think at least for this record, it was maybe more like a weird bit of local Yorkshire BBC programming about the Nag Hammadi Library or something. Often, the music for those kids' shows was created not by outsourced professionals but by civil servants tucked away in semi-abandoned BBC buildings throughout Thatcher’s Britain. Many of them were probably still connected to old hippie communities who in turn were connected to Traveller communities who were connected to Druids. Much of the old magic and rituals of rural Ireland and the UK found their way into television shows, where they could conceal their true nature within warped cheerfulness and sinister naivety.
I recently watched an Argentinian horror film, where a character said “The devil loves children and children love the devil”. That fucked me up because I can see what they mean. Children don't see a distinction between good and evil. In fact they love that feeling when the two are present together.
W&F: I loved "Two Out of Ten Thousand", may I ask what's in the vocal sample?
JO: I'm really glad you love this track and it somehow makes sense to me based on what I know of you. So peppered throughout a lot of my music are samples of various old field recordings from the Middle East and on this particular track it's a sample from the absolutely peerless SublimeFrequencies label; and this vocal is of children singing in market and it is off the I Remember Syria album. I have used lots of samples from these records.
W&F: You're a natural storyteller, and you do it with precise minimalism— how do you know when a song is finished, an album is finished— that, that story has ended?
JO: Huge part of my process is walking. I love taking tracks out for walks. I think I know that the story of the particular track has ended when I can no longer hear myself in it. When it doesn't sound performed where no one part really announces itself over another, It's usually the first moment where I am like “‘Damn. This is really cool. I wonder who made it?”
Technically I spend a lot of time working on how things land in the stereo field. I use a lot of texture and panning effects so I like to walk and listen and listen out for anything that is clashing or murking the stereo field. But also I make sure to leave mistakes in there so that you can hear the human in it all. I think for the albums, it really is a kind of imminence or arrival. Wanting them to feel like you have really gone through something and are now a different person in a different place. When I listen through to an LP I have made and the light outside just looks … older. Canted. Skewed. I want to make music that can see round corners. So when the album seem like it’s self-aware I know it’s done.
Many of the things I have made that I connect to deeply, I have absolutely no recollection whatsoever of making. But on a deeper level, I'm really always trying to get to a particular metaphysical space and I can just feel it when I arrive. It's often deliciously physical. A little bit of goosebumps or hair rising on the back of the neck.
That mixture of ecstasy and terror.
W&F: Let's say I am a dumpster witch and I could leave you a piece of vintage gear to find— what do you hope for?
JO: You are a dumpster witch. My first response is to say to leave me a Yamaha CS 80, but you probably wouldn't even be able to lift it or fit it into a dumpster and you would get arrested and deported and would have a back injury and they wouldn't give you any painkillers on the flight home. So instead I would like you to leave me:
An OG Arabic scale Casio MT-40 Casiotone with Arabic lettering please and thank you. ➿
We are proud to announce that Holy to Dogs releases on vinyl via Toronto’s We Are Busy Bodies December 6th, get the pre-order here.
Cassette editions via HOTHAM are sold out, but you can get the digital album here.
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