“In their latest release, Unknown Cities, the jazz-punk trio continues to flex their high-energy battle music muscles and virtuosic technique, while also continuing to show that they are equally adept at mixing things up.

“Unknown City” seems to recall 1960s minimalist music—I especially hear shades of Terry Riley’s “In C” in the pulsing notes that begin the piece. The association to minimalism is strengthened by the Moog-like synth bassline that runs throughout most of the song. Climaxes are achieved less through harmony and melodic peaks but through adding additional layers.”

Nick Luciano, 25YL

We’re thrilled to share our latest video, “Unknown City,” a song from our November 2021 release Unknown Cities (Procrastination Records). And we are super grateful to Nick Luciano for the wonderful review and for premiering the video on 25 Years Later. You can read the full review here.

The song, “Unknown City,” started as a piece I wrote for the improvisation class I took last year, with John on guitar. We decided to remix it into a JoF piece, and Dan Gutstein wrote stunning lyrics for it. The video was made from what was originally going to be test footage (my first time using a gimbal, lol) but we ended up having to use it due to various misadventures… John had the idea to “animate” it to sew together the look of things, and I learned how to use EbSynth to create the rotoscoped looking parts.

Thank you for watching and stay tuned for more videos soon! We’ve got an exciting 2022 planned!

As you will see if you look at the liner notes of our upcoming album, Unknown Cities, the cover art, “Dream City (variation 3)” is by Minás Konsolas.  Anna and I met Minás and Peggy Hoffman after we moved into the Baltimore neighborhood of Hampden, at 3626 Keswick Rd, across from the Royal Farms.  I won’t get into any Royal Farms stories right now (though I do with some rigor in a short story I wrote called “Miles Davis has a Theory on Art”), but our former house at 3626 Keswick has its own tales and absurdities, including a roommate, Fritz, who used another roommate (a fellow musician and serious cook) Jon Carroll’s $200 sauté pan as a cooler for a six pack of Natty Boh beer.  Fritz filled the pan with ice to the brim, shoved the beers in the ice, spilling some on the kitchen floor (if it wasn’t for the science of melting, the ice would be there to this day), brought the pan upstairs to his room, and soon, as per excess of weed, beer, and whiskey, passed out.  By the time Anna and I got to the house that day, Jon was angrily searching for something.  “Whatever it is,” I said, “I’d check Fritz’s room.”

“What would he be doing in his room with my—”  But before Jon finished, he realized, and went upstairs.  He soon came downstairs with his pan, full of icy water, and five empty beer cans floating in it—the sixth can still in bed with Fritz.  Jon had been furious, but now coming down the stairs, he couldn’t help laughing.  Fritz’s subsequent exit from this living situation (he moved in with some professional roller derby chicks as his next stop in life) is what allowed Anna to move in, a strange creation for our first apartment together.

But I digress.  And not only do I digress, I digress rather early in a piece that’s supposed to be about Peggy, Minás, and their wonderful eponymous Hampden boutique, Minás.

Minás was the loveliest shop on Hampden’s The Avenue, an avenue with many shops indeed.  The downstairs of Minás featured groovy new and used clothing, literary and novelty books, jewelry by local artisans, amusing knickknacks like Space Robot Destroy ™, and original artwork, some of it, of course, by Minás himself.  The upstairs was a gallery and performance space, and at one point my first college writing teacher, Sam Ligon, came through town on tour from his new home of Spokane, WA and did a reading for his short story collection Drift and Swerve upstairs.

Fritz actually came to that reading, and at the after party, he said something to the effect about Sam’s collection: “I wish I could write like that.” But he was too busy filling pans with ice, drinking beer, and just being Fritz to really be bothered anyway.

Two states, two college degrees, four houses, and ten years later, Anna and I receive the masters for Unknown Cities, our sixth album together as Joy on Fire (as well as another two as Three Red Crowns!) and this is a cause for celebration; except we don’t have an album cover, and without a cover, we don’t have an album, and without an album, we don’t have—and I can feel myself ranting and raving and driving Anna crazy as I now write. 

Pacing in Anna’s office, thinking about what should be the cover of an album that used to be called Red Wave but is now called Unknown Cities as per a lyric by our lyricist Dan Gutstein in our song “Unknown City,” I see, framed in glass on the wall of Anna’s office (under a painting by Anna of our cat Funz; under a print of the cover of our second album Fire with Fire*) a small blue and red depiction of a city.  This is not “Dream City,” but it is by Minás, and Anna bought it at Minás ten years ago, and, like I said, it’s up on our wall now, and it reminds me of those Baltimore days when, with Anna at class at The Peabody Conservatory of Music, I’d take a break from The Nameless, the novel I was working on at the time, and I would walk down The Avenue to Minás. 

Sometimes, Minás would be the only one in Minás, and we’d talk—art, politics, literature, sports…except I don’t actually ever remember talking about sports with Minás in Minás, so scratch the sports.  I bought a belt there once.  Eventually, the buckle came off, and it is now a toy for our cat Funz.  But it was Anna who bought the little painting all those years ago, a 4”x5” print from his ArchiteXture series, and I’m so glad she did, because even though it’s not “Dream City” and we ended up not using it for Unknown Cities, it led us to “Dream City (variation 3),” such a beautiful cover by Minás for our album!, and do you think this is all a dream anyway, Fritz?

Unknown Cities will be released on Procrastination Records November 15th, and we’ve got a bunch of upcoming shows if you want to buy one in person and come check out some of our new songs!

• (10/29 secret barn show in New Hope, PA, hit us up if you want details)
• 10/30 – Mill Hill Basement, Trenton, NJ
• 11/6 – Prototype 237, Paterson, NJ
• 11/7 – Rhizome DC, Washington, DC
• 11/27 – Trenton Social, Trenton, NJ

P.S. Minás, the shop, closed in 2014; Minás, the painter, is still working; his most recent series, A Place under the Moon, is currently at the Gallery at Manor Mill in Monkton, MD until November 14^th, you can see more info about that and Minás’ work here.

P.P.S. Fire by Fire album art by Bruno Gabrielli  Thank you again, Bruno, for your wonderful mandala.

In a dream I don’t want you to know about, “Uh Huh” plays overhead as a rugged pugilist makes his or her walk to the ring. The drums are tapping, the bass plays “dinn-dinn-dunn,” and the vocals recite what’s both obvious and ominous—“Uh Huh”—over and over again, until, of course, the song becomes electrified, a thumping action that buffets the chest—“dinn-dinn-dunn”—of the opponent. At this point, with the arena lights going all whirlybird and the crowd going all whirlybird, the song drops out and the two fighters drift toward one another.

I don’t want you to know about this dream because it precedes some violence, however sanctioned or celebrated, and yet, what sort of purity can we realistically expect of ourselves? In any event, I can’t undream it. And it’s not so far-fetched. A combatant could take courage from “Uh Huh.” (I’ve never been shown the end, don’t know if the fighter prevails.) Yet there’s quite a difference between this scenario and someone deciding to do the ultimate wrong, such as picking up a firearm, pointing it at another person (or persons) and fatally harming them.

In early 2022, the world will take stock of what will hopefully be a Covid pandemic in steep retreat. But what of the gun violence pandemic? It only seems to worsen, and it seems especially virulent in the United States. In response to some of the worst examples—such as schools attacked and innocent school children murdered—the country seems incensed, well, for a little while. Then the story fades, and gun ownership even seems to multiply. The massive lunacy of arming teachers gets trotted-out as if that’s the only conceivable solution. More weaponry.

The lyrics for “Uh Huh” refer to gun violence, yes. But they’re also aimed at the unknowable: songs that our murdered brethren are singing—as we bury them. In a fit of rage, the singer challenges the killers to return the bodies to the earth. “Uh Huh” could appear inflammatory at that moment, as if we were challenging the murderers to kill again. But in the end, when the song’s peak—including the screeching saxophone—reaches toward euphoria, it’s quite important to remember that anger has different colors. Call ours the color of outrage.

Filmmaker duo Mark Isaac and Gabriela Bulisova produced a wildly creative film that matches the outrage and the ambiguities in the music and words. As of this writing, “Uh Huh” has been the Official Selection of 12 international film festivals, from the U.S. to Europe to Asia. The emotions that accompany our win at Ghent Obskuur Film Festival and being a runner-up at Brighton Rocks Film Festival, are a mixture of humility, gratitude, and devotion to message. It’s a roughened song for a roughened age in human history. Can it be the color of your outrage? “Uh Huh.”

Hey everyone! We’ve missed you all and we’re super excited to start playing live shows this summer! (Yay vaccines!)

We’re playing a short streamed set for Trenton’s Art All Night tomorrow, June 19th at 7pm, which you can check out here!

Then our first live show will be in Ocean City, MD, June 24th, with our Procrastination Records friends Church Grim, at Crawl Street Tavern, 9pm!

The following Saturday, June 26th, we’ll be playing in Paterson, NJ at a groovy new DIY arts space, Prototype, details here!

Then looking ahead to July and August, we’ll be back at John & Peter’s in New Hope, PA on July 17th, and at Rhizome in DC on August 14th, details to come!

We would like to thank Gareth for his lively and vivid writing about Another Adventure in Red, our latest album. Concrete Islands, where the review appears, is a London-based website founded by Stewart Gardiner that features some very exciting new music as well as pieces about contemporary literature, visual arts, and spirituality. We have made some wonderful listening discoveries there, like Bristol-based Tara Clerkin Trio, and the Door to the Cosmos compilation, released by London’s On the Corner Records.

There’s a magic potency encoded in everything JOF undertakes here. Each composition has the detail you’d expect from a band who have a list of all their gigs since forming many years ago. It’s how they embellish their themes so subtly that impresses; like you’re standing naked one moment, to be luxuriously robed minutes later. As ever with JOF, your comfort zone is their target. Expect the unexpected.

Gareth Thompson, Concrete Islands

Read the whole review HERE.

And we’d like to thank Nick for hosting a very vibrant interview, where we laughed a lot, and got to revisit the band’s history, discuss politics and Philip Glass, as well as look forward to the band’s future plans. 25YL is a web publication that analyzes TV, films, music and games, with a section dedicated to Twin Peaks, which happens to be a show that we love. Just as David Lynch relishes the use of the doppelgänger archetype, we are taking advantage of this motif in our in-production video for “God and Godlessness,” as one can see in the still Nick featured as the header photo!

Check out the whole interview HERE.

We are so excited to release Another Adventure in Red, out today on Procrastination Records! This album is particularly special to us for a lot of reasons: it features so many of our wonderful friends as collaborators, and it was also recorded in our last three hometowns, Princeton, NJ, Greensboro, NC and Baltimore, MD.

First and foremost, we want to thank Tommy Hambleton, who in addition to releasing this on his record label, recorded the loveliest lap steel guitar part on the title track. John and I loved it so much that we knew immediately we had to create a remix from it, which became “Adventure in Green.” This was a joint production, and it was such a joy to work on, especially in a year without live performances. We built an arrangement around Tommy’s lap steel part for “…Red” and we just kept going and going!

Next we want to thank our dear friends and labelmates Joe Martin and Robin Eckman, of the duo 3rd Grade Friends, who we met while sharing a bill in a tiny little bar in Baltimore about a million years ago and we’ve played about a million shows with since, and it is always a blast. We had been meaning to record something with them for a while and then, a couple years ago, they drove up to Princeton, we all set up in the school’s studio, and recorded several hours of improvisation. With Chris and Robin each on their own drum set with their own assortment of percussion toys, Joe on guitar, John on bass and myself playing saxophone in addition to engineering (luckily we had enough mics and inputs for everything!), it was a great day of music! We made a note of when we hit our stride, but then, as things do sometimes, it sat on a hard drive for a while before John and I finally started mixing it. I never get tired of listening to “3rd Grade Fire”.

There are two tracks with vocals on this record, “After” and “Night Sticks,” and the lyrics to both were written by poet Brian Lampkin, who is based in Greensboro, NC. We met Brian when I was a student at UNCG, and he wrote the lyrics to “Night Sticks” while we still lived there, back in 2014. That was our first collaboration, and we actually released it as a single a few years ago. Natalie Havens, an amazing singer who was a fellow grad student at UNCG, provided the powerful vocal performance on this, and we got to perform it with her in NYC a couple years ago, where she is now based. We meant to release it on an earlier album but it never quite fit. But Mat Leffler-Schulman, of Mobtown Studios, updated the mix — we told him to go hard with it and he definitely did! And Chris’s wonderfully inventive beat on “Night Sticks” (he put a splash cymbal on the snare, creating an anvil-like sound every other hit) drives this near-disco rocker over the edge.

I first wrote “After” as a one-minute long piece for Rhymes with Opera. I had set another poem of Brian’s for a chamber music piece, and when RWO asked me to write something for a virtual performance this past summer, I found some of the other poems that he had sent and was immediately drawn to this one. I had a short synth loop that I had improvised a couple weeks before and they fit perfectly together. When John heard it, he said we should expand it into a JoF tune, which we did together. He had the idea for the structure, and also the idea to ask David Degge to play hammered dulcimer on it. David’s dulcimer parts and improvisation were just so beautiful. And then we had Mark Eichenberger play drums on it, who came up with the grooviest drum part for it—I am pretty sure I shouted when I first heard them. David and Mark brought this piece to life, and I am so grateful to them, for not only being a part of it but also recording themselves for it. Once we can hang out in real life, I owe you both so many beers!

John and I had so much fun working on this album over the past few months. When we first started working together in 2009 (holy cow it has been a long time), I had no idea what working on an album even meant. He has encouraged my growth as a musician, composer and producer and has taught me so much, and it was an honor to be his co-producer for this record. Hopefully he doesn’t make me cut this part of the blog post; I know I’ve gotten long-winded and cheesy. He is an amazing composer and bassist, he is constantly thinking about music and how to structure it perfectly and patiently. And I really think you can hear that on this record.

We consider Tommy, David, Mark, Joe, Rob, Brian, Natalie and Mat part of the Joy on Fire family, and would like to thank them all again!

Additional thanks to Dan Gutstein, Gareth Thompson, Bob Boilen, Brian Erickson, Zach Herchen, Ruby Fulton, Mika Godbole, Damien Davis, Mark Isaac, Gabriela Bulisova, Dmitri Tymoczko, Brian Platzer, and Funz.

with love,

Anna