juneunit’s debut album is full of familiar sounds—classic hardware synthesizers, analog drum machines—but there’s something special about this record. It beckons. It has a way of lulling the senses and then prodding you awake. It follows well-trodden paths to previously undiscovered destinations. It’s music that feels alive.
Not much is publicly known about juneunit. On her SoundCloud account, there are tracks in a similar vein stretching back three years; Jacktone, the Detroit label behind the record, mentions various unreleased albums on her hard drives, but this is her first official release, at least under this alias. The lack of context feels appropriate for music that refuses to give up too many of its secrets.
Running nearly an hour and a half—both full sides of a C90 cassette—juneunit is surprisingly long for a debut album, but it earns its runtime. It’s not a record made for cherry-picking. The cryptic titles (“enwm,” “fdsh6”) virtually guarantee that you’ll never remember the name of any given track; they’re meant to be anonymous, to blend in with the whole. There are no jarring left turns, no moments of rupture. It’s a single, sumptuous mood suffused in tape hiss, and the success of each track is the way that it subtly fleshes out the dimensions of this seemingly limitless fogbank.
Even inside this murkily lit world, juneunit finds plenty of variety. There are jacking house rhythms, well-worn breakbeats; there are quivering acid lines and stretches of pure ambience. Sometimes her synths recall early Oneohtrix Point Never; sometimes her dense layers of filter, flanger, and chorus suggest an artist who has logged many hours listening to Seventeen Seconds, Faith, and Pornography on a loop.
If the richness of the sound is the record’s immediate sell—anyone fond of the nostalgic warble of a record like Music Has the Right to Children will fall in love here—the true mark of juneunit’s artistry is her subtlety. It takes a while to get your bearings in juneunit’s music, but the longer you listen, the more you become aware of how many different kinds of pulses there are at work, how many different tempos. “fdsh6” sustains a feeling of being perpetually about to kick off, even though it never does. “atmw” is largely static for three minutes, just a skeletal house beat firing against swirling chords, but then halfway through, something imperceptible happens and it comes to life, flush with new layers, new voices.
Perhaps these moments are so satisfying because we recognize ourselves in their ruminative movements, as though they were metaphors for human potential. There’s something invigorating and inspiring about these late bloomers springing to fruition. We tend to think of ambient music as a refuge, a zone of safety, something to fall back upon. But in juneunit’s debut album, it might also be a springboard, a process of transformation—the search for self, set to tape.
