It was a frosty January morning, the first legitimately cold morning of 2024.
I had to swing by Food Lion and get some eggs, veggies, and a pie crust. I was cooking a quiche for brunch and it was going to be the first thing I had cooked in what felt like a year. My wife does all the cooking as it’s one of the many things she’s great at, I’m thankful she really enjoys it. Plus my rudimentary skills as a sandwich maker and cereal sous chef aren’t quite up to snuff to feed a family of two. So, I clean a mean plate for my keep, shower her in thank you’s, and stay outta the kitchen.
But today was different. I was having a new guest over for brunch, musician Joe MacPhail, who releases his solo creations under the moniker Sunsp.t, and I had to whip something up myself. The cover of his newest album of beat-inspired keys percolations, JoFi-2 on Sleepy Cat Records, features a picture of him “cooking” something up on his keyboard over his stove and I thought it’d be cheeky to talk music over a meal I’d cooked up for him. I’ve been chatting with musicians for almost a decade over the phone and love chopping it up with them about their music and inspirations, but this was new. I’d never had one over my house, let alone one where I had to chop up some peppers, onions, and broccoli and baking some savory pastry. But hey, new year, new me, so I wanted to try and master the easy task of baking a quiche while holding down an interview.
I drove to the store with a layer of cold fog hovering over the fields and streams, a warm brew of JoFi-2 steaming out of my headphones. I’ve found myself gravitating to the album in the morning when the synapses are just starting to fire, making fresh connections to the textures and sounds of the new day. Bleary tones and atmospherics ripple and waft over digitized beats and breaks and easily invite you into MacPhail’s little world of polyphonic pixelation. The whole album feels like a sunrise salutation by way of dreamy experimentation. The line “there’s a song in everyone you know”, from the opening track “Everyone You Know” repeats in my head as I hurry through the produce and dairy sections at Food Lion. Great line, I’ll have to ask about that later.
I return home and get to prepping right away, Joe will be here in 30 minutes. My inexperience shows as my wife lets me know I didn’t get the nice and flaky pie crust most people would get for a quiche, I’ve gotten the hard Pillsbury crust someone might use for a chicken pot pie. She lets me down gently and assures me I got everything else covered. The rest of the quiche is just chopping veggies and cracking eggs, which I manage decently, albeit terribly slow. That was the easy part, though. Executing the chemistry of baking my eggs, veggies, and pie crust is the hard part. I definitely don’t have a knack for that and I’m kind of just guessing the temperature and length based on a random recipe I find online. As I set the oven for 350 degrees Fahrenheit, I hear a car rumble over the rocks of the driveway.
I welcome MacPhail in and exchange pleasantries over coffee and the soul orchestrations of Quincy Jones’ Gula Matari. The sun has burned off the fog at this point, but it’s still solidly crisp out, especially for the mild winter we’ve been having up to this point. I throw the quiche into the oven and let MacPhail know we’ll have to wait 30 minutes to see how my experiment turns out for the both of us. I say a silent little prayer that the quiche comes out edible, though I have Cinnamon Toast Crunch at the ready in case I need a Plan B. With the dish baking, I switch the music to JoFi-2 so MacPhail and I can continue talking and hanging as his album sets the mood, easy like a Sunday morning.
The root of Joe MacPhail’s creation starts with keyboards around the age of 10. Through high school he took a winding path of discovery that went from Robert Randolph to Derek Trucks to Soulive to D’Angelo to Sufijan Stevens (specifically the glitched-out electronica of Age of Adz) to Flying Lotus that defined his musical foundation. “Soul and broken beats are big pillars of what I do,” MacPhail explains.
As if to slyly reference this point, the track “Inside A Dream” begins to play underneath his explanation. The warbling keyboard melody twinkles like happy tears falling from the eye of a Rufus-era Chaka Kahn, with the lo-fi boom-bap clap of the drum machine keeping your head nodding along. With a softly smiling delivery, MacPhail coos about how “some days it feels just like/ the world’s inside a dream.”
Over the past 10 years the MacPhail has been in bands and projects throughout Durham that dabble from R&B-funk (Dreamroot) to singer-songwriter (The Mountain Goats), even playing simultaneous keyboards and drums in The Oblations. The pandemic really honed the multi-instrumentalist and producer’s focus on using the keyboard as his main mode of expression. He liked the subtle ways he could use percussion without overtaking the sound, as well the versatility in tones and instruments he’s able to create with patches, programs, and filters. “I’m trying to be singer-songwriter, jazz-funk instrumentalist, producer all in one package,” says the producer, as the 8-bit beat “Moog bliphop” bubbles out the speakers with shimmering iridescence. Sunsp.t is certainly MacPhail’s most fluent use of the keyboard, as he connects bohemian beat sketches and melodic experimentations to a collage of heartfelt compositions.
I ask him about the line “there’s a song in everyone you know” that’s on the calming opening track. “We all have our own things we’re constantly dealing with. There’s that little free jazz explosion [in the middle], and it’s the implication that there’s a song in everyone you know, but it might not be the one you expect,” MacPhail says.
Finding the textures and sounds that play on those expectations is ultimately what MacPhail is searching for when he goes on his musical expeditions as Sunsp.t. There’s so much tinkering that can be done with tones and filters on the producer’s keyboard, and he’s always curious to experiment with different melodies and scales. He’s always trying to keep things fresh and new as it’s usually those first musical impressions that are the most interesting to build around.
He points to “Guitartron” as a great example. A languid loop of a Mellotron patch anchors the track and the song runs downhill on its gentle fluorescence, like a digital river running the grasses and reeds of a moonlit valley. That was the first time he had used that sound and he cobbled together that melody as he wandered and wondered over his 88 keys. Not only did it serve to be the hook of that track, it proved to be the sonic vibe that he built around as he began creating JoFi-2. “It’s something you can’t really replicate. Once you familiarize yourself with a sound, you don’t get the rush of inspiration that you do when you first play it, says MacPhail.
The oven beeped, the quiche was done. I pulled out the pan and laid it on the counter. The body was firm and herbal and the crust was toasted but not dry. Steam rushed out of the slit my knife made and I could see it was perfectly cooked through. I was quite pleased and slightly impressed, it was delectable. Maybe I should cook a little more (I should anyway, really), especially if I can turn out something as satisfying as a good quiche for a lo-fi brunch with new friends.
It’s the same satisfaction I have listening to JoFi-2 and tuning into Joe MacPhail and Sunsp.t’s frequency. That’s because it’s the sound of discovery, the sound of moving through discomfort and finding something cool and interesting on the other end. “These are all little experiments that turned out well,” says MacPhail. You might end up with something that doesn’t work, you might end up with something that exceeds expectations. Either way it’s going to be a curious little surprise, which is always a great way to start the new year.
Boogixote 