Joel St. Julien: A Deep Dive Into His Transportive Discography
Artist Profile: Joel St. Julien
A Deep Dive Into His Transportive Discography
Elise Mills
July 20, 2021
Elise meets with sound artist Joel St. Julien to discuss the importance of making music during the pandemic, the nature of what he calls the “mysticism of the present tense,” and how modular synthesis has contributed to his creative process this past year.
Photo courtesy of Joel St. Julien
Since 2013, SF-based composer and sound artist Joel St. Julien has been putting out some of the most complex, interesting sounds within the ambient and experimental music realm, which includes processed guitars and voice and his more recent explorations with modular synthesis. Never boring, his repertoire is lush, emotionally intense, exploratory, and always impressive. Between scoring for dance, documentaries, short films, and podcasts, at least one thread persists through it all: Joel is no stranger to creating soundscapes that feel alive.
From dronier passages to melodic and lyric-ful journeys, his music abounds with breath and movement, with a repetition that soothes as well as challenges. I had the pleasure of meeting with Joel to learn about the impacts of the pandemic on his music, the nature of what he calls the “mysticism of the present tense,” and how modular synthesis has contributed to his creative process this past year. I’ve included excerpts from our larger conversation throughout, as well as a sampling of Joel’s musical highlights from his discography.
A somewhat elusive and broad category, “ambient music” has a way of being mysteriously relatable and resonant through the abstract, and Joel nails that sensibility perfectly while remaining acutely aware of where his music stands in relation to himself and what is going on in the world. To my ear, what is immediately evident about his music is that much of his work embodies something more ethereal yet grounded in nature; it sits in an emotional space that is raw and immediate to the listener’s experience, but still distant enough to generate multiple interpretations. Joel also has incredible range when it comes to the genre. From Julianna Barwick-esque vocal ambient music earlier in his career to the experimental whims of modular patches of the past year, Joel is interested in playing with new techniques, yielding a variety of sounds that are absolutely unique to him and refreshing to listen to with each sound evolution.
J: There are people that are technicians when they compose. I think there is a lot of space and freedom in that. All of my music has to have an element of improvisation and mistakes, that if I were to play certain pieces live, it won’t sound like how they would on my album. I think that is what I mean by unpolished. I like it to be a little messier, a little more punk. And you see that in ambient music. There’s really pretty ambient music and then there’s some gnarly stuff. I see myself in the middle.
Much of Joel’s music is influenced by his long-held collaboration with the RAWdance contemporary dance company in San Francisco. Joel kicked off his ambient career with a commission by RAWdance in 2013, a piece called “Mine,” and continues to write for them to this day. Their most recent work together is called Collected Breath. Visible on the Salesforce Tower this past May every day at midnight, you may have noticed the projections from afar atop multiple peaks in the city. The dance piece was accompanied by an online stream of Joel’s composition. This past January, he also performed his modular piece “Fool’s Paradise” for Colorado Modular Synth Society’s January Skies livestream, a beautiful ~20 minute minimal yet cinematic modular meditation, which has become a favorite of mine. In March, you may have witnessed his live performance at Gray Area’s Patch Pulse event via Twitch.
Photography by Christian Cebrian
At the start of the pandemic, Joel splurged on a Eurorack system as a birthday present to himself and has since hunkered down to learn the ins and outs of the whimsical world of modular. Embarking on this modular synthesis journey has taken Joel’s work to the next level, resulting in new means of technical experimentation and finding new musical ways to electronically and spiritually process the events of 2020. With Bandcamp Friday as inspiration, Joel put out an essential album titled “Moral Monsters” in June 2020, which allowed him to raise $2500 for the organization BEAM in LA. The following is a portion of a description directly from Joel’s album page for “Moral Monsters”:
“Joel has created a sonic spiritual world to walk through the many experiences of Blackness – to walk into your worst nightmare and come through it, changed.. His latest release, “Moral Monsters” is a tale of regeneration. Floating and extended, watching your life surrounded by burning crosses to only fall into the refrain of “New Truth” singing, “We grow.” This is a ritual, a sacred space.”
According to Joel, this album was also the beginning of a change in mindset in terms of his musical output– no longer as concerned with the perfection of his art, Joel has focused on putting out as much music into the world as he can because it’s the process and personal experience of making music that has held a sacred place in his life that takes priority.
J: Music became more important… The mix of Covid and being a parent and trying to figure out how to do this whole thing during Covid and then these continued narratives and stories of Black people being killed, I really let myself experience and express myself through music in ways I never had before. It’s been really powerful.
Joel is particularly interested in how his compositions explore and inform what he describes as the “mysticism of the present tense.” Previously with guitar and voice, and now with modular, Joel describes how the act of musical improvisation in the studio can be a deeply spiritual experience:
J: It’s coming from a place where I’m letting myself be spontaneous… It’s nothing new. This is nothing new. All people who create talk about this… For me, it’s never out of body, but there’s this zone, this space. That present moment is really… there's nothing else. I can hear it when I’m listening back to those improvisations. Part of that is being present. The art of being creative is being present. And for me, I see it as a spiritual practice, not attached to any sort of thing. But it feels really deep, and it feels bigger than myself.
I asked him about what draws him to creating ambient music, and how the genre has been a gateway to experiencing “the mysticism of the present tense.” What has creating space within ambient music meant to him as a whole?
J: Everyone loves Brian Eno, he’s like the godfather. But I knew I wanted to make ambient music after I heard [William Basinski’s] Disintegration Loops. It just floored me. I think going back to that present tense… There's something about the repetition. Getting lost in the music. Ambient music creates that. I like the idea of creating space. I also like the idea of ambient music as within a tradition of Afrofuturism, as creating spaces for me to exist in. That feels really good. It all goes with my love of sci-fi, etc. but the idea of creating a space for me to be in, it was such an ‘aha’ moment. This connects to that. Ambient music creates open spaces that are very subjective to the listener. You can listen to my music, and it can have all these meanings for you that are completely different from the meaning for me. And I think that’s awesome. That’s really what ambient music is, and the music I'm creating, that’s sort of the space I am going to keep exploring. I’ve found a home in that.
The shift to modular this past year was a natural transition for Joel’s compositional practice. It’s changed the way he improvises, the way he approaches production, and confirmed for him how few tools one really needs to create music:
J: A lot of the sounds I was making pre-modular was coming from my guitar––making music with my guitar and then processing that in different ways. I think what I like about modular is that it provides a different flexibility for me. There’s just something wild about working on music with modular. These machines are just doing stuff that’s like nuts. It’s crazy. There’s a part of me that’s just like, I’ll just put a couple of tools together, let’s see how this works. I’m still figuring a lot of it out. Super expressive and weird and it just feels right.
(after about 15 minutes of us geeking out about modular later…)
I haven’t even started thinking about singing into it. There’s so much I can do. I don't really need to buy anything more; I have enough. I’m inspired by people who have these really small systems… makes me realize that I have more than enough. Modular has also influenced my production afterwards. I can use post-production LFOs. I didn't play around with that until after using modular.
Considering the breadth of Joel’s work, I was curious to hear which piece stands out to him the most:
J: I would’ve mixed and recorded it different, but there’s something really precious… I love “Through My Fingers Through the Deep.” “No safety” and three other pieces, all 15 minutes each for RAWdance. It was written for this outdoor performance where everything was happening at the same time for 15 minutes in Yerba Buena Gardens. Dancers would be moving around through it. And the audience would walk through “the second piece” to the third to the first. By the end of the show, you would have seen all three pieces. “No safety” would come on as a signal to move to the next piece. There’s a nostalgia to this piece. It was so moving to be in a space where my music was everywhere. That’s an album I would put on just to listen to it. There’s the music I love but also the experience. I was writing that during the time I went to a composer’s retreat at Walden. And it’s one a lot of people haven't heard. But I really love that one.
Joel continues to keep busy musically. Currently, he’s finishing up another album before the summer ends, which he thinks is quite Tim Hecker-ian, and looks forward to a piece that will be coming out on tape on the Land and Sea Oakland label this fall. Follow Joel on Instagram to keep up with all his musical adventures and updates, and be sure to check out (and purchase!) his work on Bandcamp. More information and insights about his past and present projects are also available on his website for deeper reading and contemplation.
Elise is a recovering 2020 graduate, sound artist, and noise lover born and raised in San Francisco. Especially interested in the metaphysicality of sound, she spends her time attempting to prototype DIY synthesizers and experimenting with (and lamenting!) the whims of magnetic tape, among other experimental electronic projects.