Joni Void

Experimental Electronic Music Artist

Joni Void is the newly minted pseudonym of producer Jean Cousin – known until now in the Soundcloud, Bandcamp and other online communities as Johnny Ripper. A self-taught musician making tracks since he was 14 years old and living in Lille, France, Cousin moved to Montréal in 2012 to pursue Film Studies. He plunged into the city’s fertile DIY/loft scene and in a spirited transformation, evolved from cloistered bedroom/virtual persona to highly engaged organizer and performer. Cousin has self-released a cavalcade of original albums and remixes since 2011; Selfless is his debut release on a record label. Cousin’s earliest records, made as a teenager, combine piano and field recordings, inspired by the film soundtracks of Jon Brion, Philip Glass and Yann Tiersen and the sample worlds as Boards Of Canada, The Books, Four Tet and Burial. His efforts situated him within a compelling network to bedroom artists and DIY producers with analogous lo-fi production and song-making intuition who espoused the ethos of self-release, sharing/interacting directly and personally through the internet. An increasing obsession with micro-sampling, aleatory composition, history of cinema and the techniques of foley and film sound editing – along with an expansively active practice of remixing and beat-making – has seen Cousin’s music flourish in fascinating ways. Perhaps most importantly, Cousin now constructs his tracks entirely from found sources and aims not to ‘play’ anything at all. His personal hero Delia Derbyshire (White Noise; the early years of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop) cemented his commitment to making musique concrète avant-pop inspired by these analog tape-based pioneers (albeit now utilising today’s more accessible digital tools).