Gabriel Lavoie Viau - Soli Juno Gloria

 Released: October 24

Like many others, I find the Juno series of synthesizers to be particularly adept at evoking a sense of fuzzy nostalgia with its warm circuitry and general tonality. For his debut album, Montreal-based composer Gabriel Lavoie Viau takes this same affinity and turns it into an assortment of emotive instrumental pieces on Soli Juno Gloria. The album was born out of a sense of impending anxiety and the urge to find measurable relief, which was found in the circuits of the Juno. It’s a surprisingly wide-ranging album that manages to find a swathe of interesting tones and textures that keep the album moving along.

Many of the tracks are named after the Juno itself in the form of Roman numerals. One of my favorite tracks here shares this naming convention with “Juno XVI.” It has this very late-80s RPG vibe to it with a certain crunchiness in the pads and lead for the first half. The second half tones down some of the crunchy vibes and instead gives us a more relaxed vibe that still feels somewhere in the vicinity of dungeon synth, but more on the ambient side.  “Sunny Sobriety” is another track that really takes advantage of the Juno’s idiosyncratic tones, giving us something infused with with a slight bit of the dramatic. The song feels like it is climbing for much of the runtime, slowly growing in its depth and complexity as the melody becomes more and more involved. It continues this climb all the way to nearly end when all of it suddenly stops and just leaves us with a single high-pitched tone to sign off on. The closest we get to a purely ambient track is in the muted tones and slow attacks of “Random Drive Find,” which eschews anything resembling a lead and instead gives us mountains of soft pads. 

Overall, I found it to be a wonderfully engaging bit of nostalgic noise. The tracks play out like short vignettes, exploring a certain emotional idea and then fading away. It feels very stream of consciousness in a way, but with enough substance there to really latch onto, even if only for a short time.