Analogue Appreciation: Joe Armon-Jones | Huck

Dur­ing the pan­dem­ic, Joe Armon-Jones was itch­ing to make music. With lock­down rules pre­vent­ing him from going to the stu­dio, the Ezra Col­lec­tive key­boardist and pro­duc­er decid­ed to fash­ion his own set­up with­in the con­fines of his own south Lon­don home, inspired by leg­endary Jamaican dub sound engi­neer King Tubby’s work with mix­ing desks.

Soon, he had a set­up led by tape machines and spring reverb and began exper­i­ment­ing with dub pro­duc­tion. Blend­ing those old school tech­niques with his for­ward think­ing take on impro­vi­sa­tion­al jazz ulti­mate­ly formed the roots of his new album, All The Qui­et (Part II), which releas­es today and fol­lows on from All The Qui­et (Part I), dropped ear­li­er this year.

With much of the record­ings com­ing togeth­er and edit­ed on tape, the album is pumped full of the typ­i­cal­ly rich detail, hiss and warmth found across Armon-Jones’s discog­ra­phy. Fea­tures come from the likes of Hak Bak­er, Green­tea Peng, Wu Lu and Yazmin Lacey, with horns and sub bass under­scored by intri­cate drum solos and washed out by tape echo and delay. All The Qui­et (Part II) is an album built for intro­spec­tive sofa ses­sions as much as blissed out sun­ny fields in the upcom­ing fes­ti­val season.

To cel­e­brate the new release, Armon-Jones joins us for Ana­logue Appre­ci­a­tion, our series cel­e­brat­ing the pow­er of phys­i­cal cul­ture in a world dom­i­nat­ed by screens. ​“The theme is music, of course,” he explains of his picks. ​“I think phys­i­cal objects are impor­tant because you have to care for them and main­tain them. And the act of doing that lit­er­al­ly makes you enjoy them more. Even though it is a pain to have to get my Rhodes ser­viced, or my Ham­mond organ oiled every year, the act of doing it reminds me why I have the objects in the first place.”

Dur­ing a time when music, and much of life’s plea­sures being acces­si­ble instant­ly at the tap of a thumb, for Armon-Jones, phys­i­cal records are a reminder to slow down, and to cher­ish the sounds that we hear. ​“In my opin­ion a lot of peo­ple have been tricked out of own­ing things like music, and had this own­er­ship replaced by a sub­scrip­tion mod­el that means at the end of the day, you don’t actu­al­ly own any­thing,” he con­tin­ues. ​“There is a plea­sure and selec­tive­ness that comes from buy­ing music. You can’t buy all the music in the world, so you pick things that you like and only buy that. Now you have that music, and you lis­ten to it. I remem­ber spend­ing my last £25 in my bank account on a J Dil­la remix­es rare vinyl I found. Stu­pid finan­cial deci­sion but I will always trea­sure that record.”