Zenapolæ

Jopy is a collaborative that was formed in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Jopy music is produced by cutting and pasting processed field recordings, vocal samples, hand percussion, children’s toy instruments, flutes, synthesizers, guitars, and electric bass. Some of the music uses algorithmic software processes, but there is human aesthetic control being exercised at all times.

Jopy music typically starts as either a looped audio sample or a chord progression that was worked out on piano or guitar. Electronic audio processing is then used to scramble up these recognizable music elements, and more audio is layered on top of this to make the formal construction even harder to detect.

So the end product is traditional musical motifs and ideas, as heard through a watery haze. The goal is to create an atmosphere or aural texture which isn't heard in terms of discrete melodic, rhythmic, or harmonic processes. One of the main challenges is creating contrasts and movement while keeping the more traditional "representational" musical figures at the level of the preconscious.

In an ideal world, Jopy music arrives subliminally for the listener, in the moment when they are preoccupied doing something else and suddenly hear something in a piece that sounds new and interesting that they hadn't expected to hear or in the form of an emergent process that they hadn't seen unfolding.