letjoux gets paid the moment you buy his music on Catalog.
There’s songs we live our lives to and songs that freeze the clocks: thumbs off the glass, mental gnats dispersed, attention undivided. Enter letjoux, whose debut full-length About Face delivers both in droves. It's out everywhere tomorrow (Friday), June 6.
Project opener “??? !!!" offers a score for heavenly bodies, carbon bubbles affixing each hummed note with a set of wings; one-and-a-half minutes in tune with the infinite, affirming life without saying a word. Contrast that with “Paper Tiger,” written as a thank you note to immigrant mothers. letjoux sings above his own vibrant bass-playing with a quiet confidence so central to his mic presence, which turns each listener into a head-bobbing confidant.
Across 10 tracks, the Oregon angel makes his case that the past is forever ahead of us, that the most formative answers come in communion, not solitude. Equally inspired by the veiled poems of Richard Siken and the healing powers of Vietnam waters, this is one of those releases that we expect to only grow more rewarding with time. Tune in for the folklore and ultralush harmonies.
We're excited to share a new mini interview with letjoux that delves into the importance of elders' stories, his Portland community, manning a dozen instruments, temporal theories, and more. Thank you for reading, listening, and supporting. Stay safe and inspired out there <3
Siber: What happened to the Paper Tiger in 1992? Who is she?
letjoux: The song "Paper Tiger" is about mothers. Tiger moms! A paper tiger is defined as "a person or thing that appears threatening, but is ineffectual." I wrote this in the process of understanding all that my mom had to go through in immigrating to the States in '92. All she taught me, all she gave me, and all the times it was just too much. I wanted to write this as a way to say, “I want to let you know I understand, no need to apologize. Matter of fact, I deeply thank you.” I remember during a particularly stormy day, the power went out. My brother and I were scared and sat on the carpet holding each other. In basically pure darkness, my mom scrambled to light candles to calm us down and to feed us, cooked Vienna sausages over the open flame. I couldn’t imagine how lost she felt then, but she made sure we weren’t.
Siber: We’ve spoken a bit about your family in Vietnam — have more members followed in your mom's footsteps?
letjoux: Yes I’m glad you asked! A lot of my family gained citizenship to the US (ew) and currently live packed into my parent’s house. I do love the festivities of sitting around a flimsy giant table eating lunch with all of them. There’d be times I’d walk out a door somewhere here and see bamboo, or get a waft of air that made me miss Vietnam. There’s this beach that has waves that come in diagonally, the sky goes purple at sunset, and doctors prescribe you to go into the waters to heal asthma and arthritis. I would say that when I try to invoke healing in my songs, I think of that place as I write.
Siber: It seems to me like you place a tremendous amount of value and energy on your lyrics. I was curious to ask what 'good' songwriting meant to you, if that's changed for you since DENDRON...
letjoux: Honestly, good songwriting for me changes a lot. I think for me at the moment, it means enduring the fear of being nondescript, insufferable, off-key/rhythm, if it serves the purpose of conveying the emotion or message I want to invoke. I'm still working on it… One of my favorite writers, Richard Siken, says in a poem, "I want to tell you this story without having to confess anything." I interpret that as being the desire to tell your story without the shame, guilt, pain, or whatever it is you bear from enduring it. I want to be able to embrace being more candid and vulnerable as a songwriter.
Siber: What's the story behind the About Face newspaper?
letjoux: The main story in the newspaper is folklore my grandma told me that originated from her village. I can’t find that story anywhere online so it was cool to bring it to life in some form. It’s about how the moon got its face from an herbalist that tried to heal their village by any means necessary. (If anyone wants to connect those dots, get the newspaper!) I wrote the words, then Nia Musiba and Tam Vo helped me design it and bring it to life. The concept of the newspaper itself is sort of this play on how we perceive time. I read about this village that views us as moving backwards into the future, the past being in front of us. A lot of this album is a retrospective question... Me asking myself, "Did I do the right thing? Did I deal with this the right way?" So the newspaper serves as a lil play on what their purpose usually is for. Instead of current events, current issues, I wrote a story of the ‘past.' In a way it’s to show that while time moves in a line, it also passes through a spiral.
Siber: Portland’s undergone so much change since DENDRON a half-decade ago. What local music support systems or sacred places have come and gone? Have new communal efforts risen up?
letjoux: Oh my God, I could write a love letter about the community in Portland. I work as an audio engineer out of EXT. 606 and About Face wouldn’t have existed without the support from 606, and all the people involved in it. When the pandemic hit, we were in Omari Jazz’s Discord a lot, just geeking about music, and people came from all over. Then all of a sudden, those people from all over moved out here and we just continued that bond in real life. The communal efforts have been pretty formless, but the people here are some of, if not the most, supportive, inspiring, and inclusive people on the planet. We also have a good few organizations! Portland'5 has put on a ton of concerts, funding them for up and coming artists. RACC has also funded a ton of people to make their projects come to life.
Siber: 'Community,' as vague and overused as the word is, also makes itself known in more subtle ways too. Like how the visual language for a project might be shaped by the landscapes, objects, spaces that are simply just around and available locally.
letjoux: My best friend Miguel [Martinez] works out here in tape deck repair and that sparked the idea of using an oscilloscope, this tool for calibrating electronics and visualizing voltage/audio. I knew you could make images through sound on it but I decided to try and make an animation by sequencing audio files of it and have sort of these ‘subliminal’ flashes of imagery that relate to the album. Then there's Pecky the Pigeon, looked after by a friend's friend, Fern, who works in aviary presentation. Pecky is one of many pigeons named after cheeses there, so Pecky's full name is Pecorino Romano!
Siber: I know you can carry so much musical weight on your own, but you also have members of that local family giving their all.
letjoux: I got to play a lot of instruments on this album: my bass (a hollow body EB-2 bass that plays like a dream), piano, stratocaster, nylon string, erhu, Đàn tranh, I haven’t gotten to really get into drums as much as I want, but thankfully I know amazing drummers like Miguel and Alexander Abrazaldo. I also got to mess with some of Ableton’s Max for Live plugins that really push things toward left field. For the background vocals, we have HUNJIYA, one of my first friends I made sharing music publicly. She’s a force to be reckoned with and a giant inspiration for vocals. We also have Contour, who is also an old friend and one of my big inspirations. Omari is all over this project, overseeing basically every song. He is one of those friends that brings everyone together, one you only make once in a lifetime.
Siber: Your music is brimming with these shimmering details. Strings, wind instruments, little synths dancing for a moment then vanishing. Why do you think your ear's drawn to them?
letjoux: In music, an art form that has bounds to rhythm and repetition, I like to add a bit of one-and-done blips to counterbalance rigidity. It's a habit that I like to think comes from observing asymmetry in real life. If I were to visualize it, it’d be like a rolling tumbleweed, a plane passing by, road rage, Christmas carolers, etc. My friends and I in town do love making just random sounds on any instruments we have set up and trying to see where the sounds they make fit best. With a lot of sounds, you can only set 'em up here and there without much space for repetition. For the vocal harmonies, I was just twiddling with the 6/8 time signature and found out it fit like a glove. [Laughs]
Siber: If you sit down and read this album, so much of it feels like a story of self-preservation in order to show up for others. Even with that support system around you in Portland, did you face any internal obstacles while working on this?
letjoux: Oh boy, yeah. Much of this album has really just been me tackling grief and its uncertainties. For years working on this album, I had this silly need of reaching some moral ‘epiphany’ to tie the album together. A lot of the songs are begging these questions I thought I needed to answer on my own. I felt responsible to find a cure. I lost a few people close to me, and only through the grief did I really reach the conclusion that all I needed was someone to hold my cheek while I sweated out the confusion.
Siber: On the last song, "Break Your Fall," it sounds like you reach a point where responsibilities flip, and you can give the same support.
letjoux: That song is the embodiment of the 'epiphany’: "I may not understand the weight you bear, but I’ll cup your cheek as you bear it."
letjoux gets paid the moment you buy his music on Catalog.
