Joemca: The Composer in the Electronic Age (Hyphen Magazine)

Joemca is a musical Rubix cube. Flip him one way, and he’s a groupie-inducing rock star with a brooding onstage persona and a resoundingly deep voice set to catchy electronic beats. Flip him another, and he’s a humble, pensive classically-trained violinist and pianist. Flip him yet again, and you’ll find a composer of Chinese opera music who scored his own quirky music for puppet shows. No easy puzzle to solve, Joemca is a chameleonic hybrid of his diverse artistic and personal influences, from Slash to Dylan Thomas, Jeff Buckley to Sam Cooke.

A classical violinist and pianist from childhood, Joemca was enraptured with Mozart from a young age, but might have ended up in an orchestra if it weren’t for a certain guitar hero. “In high school,” he explains, “I literally learned from Slash, bought the sheet music of Guns n Roses. I really loved playing Slash’s guitar line in ‘Estranged.’” Soon thereafter in high school, Joemca began listening to the Smashing Pumpkins and the iconic solo folk rock troubadours who mirrored his musical style, including Jeff Buckley, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Hank Williams and Van Morrison.

But being the musical dodecahedron he is, Joemca wanted to expose himself to every genre of music under the sun, even if he wasn’t interested in rapping, jazz singing or playing the Cuban batá drum. “I'm mostly interested in solo artists who sound like no one else, but I also got into Wu-Tang Clan – production is amazing. And Cuban music is king rhythmically, that stuff is just fire. And then there’s the experimental and electronic stuff that I like – a lot of it is from Germany and Japan. And then there’s the old school stuff like Duke Ellington – monster with arrangements – Monk, Lady Day, Ella, Edith Piaf, Elvis, Lloyd Price.”

It wasn’t until college that all the loose ends of his various musical interests started to come together. Joemca took an electronic music course at Vassar College, toiling away with a few other dedicated musicians in a dark, gothic classroom, learning to make his own beats and experimenting with DIY recording. Molding together a host of friends playing classical stringed instruments, his own laptop beats, his electric guitar and his poetic, emotional lyrics, Joemca created a style that would later distinguish him in the big sea of New York folk and punk musicians. His hybridization of styles garnered him wide appeal, attracting electronic, folk, indie rock, punk and classical fans, although it did not fit neatly into any of those genres. With a voice as powerful and versatile as Antony and lyrics and instrumentation as intelligent and melancholy as Andrew Bird, Joemca seems poised for the same kind of indie stardom. How does he feel about the potential for fame and the strange effects it can have on an artist’s work?

“I'm hoping that as long as the music is good, it'll find a way out there with or without the whole business of the hype machine and everything,” he said. “Playing for large crowds seems like fun, and i imagine the pressure might be a good thing for the creative process, but this world is unpredictable and I'll be making music forever and that's what really matters. The best thing would be that I could keep doing it the way I do whilst paying rent, and eating, and taking care of the boring practical stuff.”

He’s starting to get there. Although few people outside of New York know Joemca’s live music as he has yet to embark on a national or international tour, his 2007 eponymous EP, produced by legendary Lennon and Ono producer Rob Stevens, has earned him spots as SPIN Magazine’s Artist of the Day, URB Magazine’s Featured Artist and CMJ Radio’s Top 200 Artists. And Ono herself showed up at one of his shows at Mercury Lounge.

In the band’s live performances, the tour de force that is Joemca’s voice fills the entire room without much need for amplification. It is clear that Joemca the artist is the star and director of Joemca the band, which thus far has been a rotating collective of poets and musicians. Now, that collective is solidifying into a more organized, focused four-piece band that is slowly maturing in its live sound, a challenge for any band with electronic sounds to replicate live, with Joemca as lead vocals/guitarist, Jess Luck as keyboardist/backup vocals, Alec Menge as drummer, and Tucker Yaro as bassist.

Despite recording for twelve hours a day in his home studio, Joemca found time to compose music for the FringeNYC Festival’s presentation of a Chinese opera starring Luck called “The Disembodied Soul,” which takes its story from an original musical drama from the 14th century Yüan dynasty. “Joemca’s music provides an evocative and creative soundscape,” said New York Theatre critic David Reinwald. “The singers’ voices soar over the glorious rhythms and musical overtones.” As if composing for an ancient opera wasn’t unusual enough, Joemca also scored music for St. Ann’s Warehouse’s Puppet Lab. “I made all the sounds and voices,” he explained. “It's sort of in between sound design, and scoring, and definitely more on the experimental end.”

Experimental, yes, but one could hardly describe Joemca’s music as soul or gospel, and yet he draws a very important inspiration from one such singer, a man named Sam Cooke. A legendary soul singer who injected the gospel style into his mainstream soul music and supported the civil rights movement, Cooke seems an unlikely godfather for an electronic rock artist like Joemca. But listening to his records in Joemca’s small sunlit home studio in South Park Slope, I heard a similar emotional vulnerability that that translated well into his recorded music.

“What I learned from Sam Cooke (who admired Louis Armstrong and Frank Sinatra for this) was the way they sing, it's like they're just talking to you. The music is really simple. That's what really got to me,” said Joemca. “Once I got into Sam Cooke, I started trying to be more direct, so it’s less quirky now, my stuff.”

When I mention to Joemca that his lyrics can be a bit difficult to understand and his musical patterns can convolute the brain, the side of him that is loyal to the simplicity of Sam Cooke seems to fret. “I would like to bring my lyrics a little closer to the surface,” he says. “Some people in the avant-garde world go too far, isolate themselves. As for my music, yes, I want my stuff to have that experimental side but it can also be enjoyed by anybody. That's how you communicate more.”

But those brooding, convoluted lyrics are part of what make Joemca’s puzzles so intriguing. “I shot the white bird out of the stream/I shot the white horses with a raging fury/I shot the old ghost with a panic vision/I shot the old world and I’d do it again,” Joemca sings passionately on “Panic Friend.”

“Panic Friend”’s dizzying beats hit like electronic hopscotch on the listener’s mind, making the simplicity of the next song, “Glass Eyes,” a bright clearing after being lost in “Panic Friend”’s dense, hazy forest. In “Glass Eyes,” echoing piano and whistled refrains layer with the clarity of Jess Luck’s opera-trained soprano and Joemca’s deep tenor. The classical element grooves strangely well with the electronic beats in other songs, such as “Strangers,” a song about the isolation of big city life and the separation between human souls. Multiple lonely Joemca voices layer over each other, keeping each other company.“I’m lost out here in the daylight, in the middle of a field/Out here we’re not free and there’s no one left around/In this town all the time, we’re all strangers/I see their faces in my dreams all the time/And I’ve always been afraid to find that someone.”

But sitting in his small sunlit studio, it doesn’t look like Joemca is lonely, his head tilted toward the radio playing Sam Cooke, the spirits of Rimbaud, Dylan Thomas and Mozart floating around the room, occupying his books and music. His music has connected many people already, including himself to many listeners who are eager for his next album. If the EP was just a fragment of his vision, we’re looking forward to what’s next.