Victoria and Vancouver Island have a lot of musical talent, and Victoria Buzz wants to highlight some of the best and brightest local artists and bands.
Every Monday, there will be a fresh ‘New Music Monday’ article to help people find and support local artists and bands that are up-and-coming, well established or hidden gems!
For this endeavour, Victoria Buzz has partnered with our good friends at CFUV 101.9 FM, UVic’s campus radio station, to find and select the musicians and bands for this regular column.
To date, there have been 86 New Music Monday features published through this collaboration.
This week, JP Meldrum is the New Music Monday highlight!
JP Meldrum is a man who wears many hats. He has numerous music projects, is a local filmmaker, runs a film distribution company, has a radio show on CFUV and is an event organizer and promoter to boot.
Musically, Meldrum has created an impressive body of work with an estimated total of 54 albums released under his name alone.
He recently released a new experimental electronic album, get me off this boat, on July 20th.
For this project, he incorporated elements of house, techno and vaporwave, along with the principles of noise music, which was his first true inspiration for creating music.
“I started off in a noise-rock band that kind of came together ad hoc,” Meldrum told Victoria Buzz.
“I had my own weird experimental solo project and buddies from high school were playing in it but they kind of all dropped off one-by-one and I had already booked a show.”
This ultimately led to the creation of one of his first bands, SCHOOLGIRL, an experimental noise project.
Along with noise, Meldrum also created hip hop under the name Phillip Morris, electronic music under the moniker Formidable Licorice and has since become involved in Healslime, Perfect Match, io and Really Loud Free Jazz.
He says he loves the freedom that comes with noise and production work, which he tries to employ when creating the music he releases under his own name.
“Anything can be music, anything can be spontaneous, I just got really into the process of making albums, and from there participating in a number of subgenres,” he said.
Meldrum says he’s always approached his solo work as an “anything goes” project.
When it comes to get me off this boat, Meldrum describes the theme that ties the album together as “cartoony.”
“These tracks are all cartoony—there’s songs I didn’t put on there for a reason,” he said.
“They’re cartoonish, like a comic book, or the ‘Sunday funnies.’”
One unlikely inspiration for the album came from Heathcliff one-panel comic strips.
“They’re really bizarre, and they’re in newspapers still—like single panel comics that make no sense at all. They’re so abstract, but I’m just deeply charmed by them,” said Meldrum.
“He’s not Garfield, but he’s this little orange cat and there’s all these weird blob guys with a single line of text under the panel, and it’ll say something like ‘There sure are a lot of birds out today,’ but there’s no birds in the panel.”
Meldrum says he especially took inspiration from these comics when creating the crudely drawn album artwork for get me off this boat.
Highlight track – “lay low / more time alone”
Meldrum’s highlight track off the 14-song album is “lay low / more time alone,” an instrumental piece which is also the longest track, clocking in at nine minutes 13 seconds.
He says that this song took him the longest of all the songs on the record.
“It took probably six hours of work over three months—that was one I always went back to and tightened up,” he said.
“I was really having fun with the tremolo effect on that one, automating it to be super delayed and groovy and have this super late drop. It’s actually quite minimal, but because it takes so long to get there it hits.”
He says he really tried to use some “elite level production trickery” that he usually doesn’t have the time or effort for.
Meldrum noted that, in his mind, “lay low / more time alone” was the centrepiece of the album when he was making it.
For this track he utilized some samples from the Nintendo DS, giving some parts a nostalgic sound behind the effects and other tracks.
“The Nintendo DS is interesting because it’s technically still a 16-bit [sound] like the Super Nintendo, and I love the affect of that era, but people can do it on a computer as opposed to a sequencer like back in the day,” he explained.
“So you can do more complex things musically and still use contemporary production techniques on it, but it’s still 16-bit processing… If we stuck with 2D video gaming technology, this is what the music would have sounded like and I find that kind of cool and interesting.”
Check out “lay low / more time alone” by JP Meldrum below:
Listen to “lay low / more time alone,” get me off this boat and the rest of JP Meldrum’s catalogue on Bandcamp, Tidal, Spotify and Apple Music.
Because this is a solo recording project for Meldrum, he says he has no shows, and no intention to play shows anytime soon.
As for what’s next for JP Meldrum, he joked that by the time this article was published there would already be a few new releases by him out there and kept his word by releasing a new track, “For Sakamoto Sensei” on August 13th.
Additionally, he is finishing up filming a feature film, producing a new io record, looking to find a producer to finish a few Perfect Match singles and hosting a weekly show on CFUV called Problem Child, which airs at 5 p.m. on Thursdays.
“It’s endless, it’s truly endless,” Meldum said of all the creative endeavours he has on the go.
Keep an eye on JP Meldrum’s Instagram to stay up to date on future releases and other projects.
Related:
- New Music Monday: Amnesiak speaks to trans experience on latest album
- New Music Monday: Miss the Heart channels feminine-rage on new single
- New Music Monday: Hawk & Steel release first album after 9-year hiatus
CFUV is a non-profit campus and community radio station that plays a ton of local music of all kinds across Vancouver Island. If you like to support local music they are an amazing resource with a plethora of new local tunes in their arsenal.
“CFUV sincerely reminds people that they have a voice, even if they feel that they do not deserve a voice or that the world doesn’t know what to do with their voice,” said Meldrum.
“It’s the place to go if you feel that way.”
Tune into CFUV 101.9 FM on air or online!
Let us know what you think of JP Meldrum in the comments below!
