Jonah Haché is not an easy artist to pin down. He’s performed as part of bands like Les Païens, Get Used To It, Something Delicious and Stephen Lewis & The Big Band of Fun, and usually in the role of a technocratic wizard, working an elaborate magic that fleshes out the part of a larger whole. Now, for the first time in five years Haché is stepping back into the limelight with his 5th solo album, That World Already Ended.
Haché’s own work lists towards the cerebral; it bridges the genres of lo-fi trip-hop, electro-acoustic orchestral, and what he describes as IDM, or the thinking man’s EDM. It’s eclectic by nature, with a strong focus on production and technical proficiency. In fact, production has been almost his complete focus.
“Audio resolution is way bigger of a deal to me,” responds Haché when asked how the last five years have influenced him.
“I got into lofi processing too and do use it a bit, but I ended up cleaning up and tweaking tones way more than past albums. Even once I hit the mastering stage, because I was self-mastering, it made me go back to the mix quite a few times and tweak a thing for two. I use way more effects now that I loop in Ableton. I’ll loop my instrument, but then loop more effects over the instruments allowing more dynamic and trippy transitions. Track 1 of the album has quite a bit of that, as it’s a song I recorded live off the floor.
“As an audio engineer, I had a lot of fun playing with the limits of tape compression with electronic beats. Tweaked quite a few times before finalizing on my master output levels and compression amount.”
You can practically hear him beaming as he describes his process. Chances are, he’s given adorable nicknames to every button on his synth pad. But Haché tends to work in one gear: sheer enthusiasm, and the deeper he can dive into this elaborate heavy geekery, the happier (albeit lonelier) he is. It’s a level of technological specializing that has allowed Haché to create a niche for himself within the festival world, with skills blurring from audio to visual and into his image mapping and projecting B1T5 persona, and folding himself into other projects as a rather unique puzzle piece.
“For the last 5 years I leaned towards projects with my friends and musicians I respected like Stephen and the boys from Les Païens, says Haché. “Since Païens are on hiatus and I no longer play with Stephen, I’ve had the time to create something from just within.
“VJ’ing and projection installations have also taken over a part of my life that I wasn’t expecting. The fact of the matter is my solo project is always what ends up on the backburner, when I play in a lot of other bands.
“It’s the least accessible music of any project I’ve been in (with exception of Something Delicious,” laughs Haché, “and it’s more fun to play with your buds.”
The album is perhaps best described as “textured” with Haché working in a series of heavily layered effects. At times, like with “Confessions of a Depressed Thirty-Something,” Haché seems to channel Bon Iver’s vocoder-laden ennui, with “Hums” sounds like a drunk-dial from Radiohead’s Thom Yorke. He also evokes the likes of Björk and Aphex Twin, admittedly blushing at the possibility of his influences being worn on his sleeve.
Despite some rose-coloured tracks on the largely instrumental album, Haché says The World Already Ended is his expression of a much darker matter.
“This album is the darkest thing I’ve ever put out,” admits Haché. “There’s a couple of fun tracks for sure, like ‘Fuck it, I’m Joining Starfleet’ and ‘Patterns of a Tennis Match,’ but a lot of the material is music I composed going through a depression that I had for a couple of years, that I only really started to find my way out of the past year.”
Haché says that his depression has not been a subject he’s discussed frequently or publicly outside of his partners and bandmates, but this album is his way of getting it out.
The album is also an anthem for Haché’s musical liberation. The title serves a more than a stark reminder that our society and planet is quickly eroding, but also a landmark in Haché’s career a musician; it’s an self-acknowledgement that a solo project of indifferent financial futures is beholden to no one but himself.
Haché has plans to tour the album live, he is currently performing a live stream of the album from his green-screen studio. The stream will include a mix of live performances from Haché’s 5 album catalogue, viewed through multiple cameras and refed through his VJ software, to make the online stream a multimedia experience. That World Already Ended will also be released on CD and cassette, both of which will contain their own surprise tracks.