NJD: The first thing I always notice when I open a new C Joynes album is that it always looks like a very personal art concept on your records.

CJ: Yeah, definitely. It’s one of the things that I’ve always really enjoyed. For me it’s always been part of the whole process – it’s included artwork and design and all of that sort of thing. I’ve always really liked albums that are put together and presented in a way where it looks like a hermetically sealed concept – where it’s stuff that’s been produced by one person or a very limited group of people. For example, all the self-released Sun Ra albums, I just love the artwork and graphics on those. Also the stuff that Billy Childish put out when he was self-releasing his own stuff. So right from the get go that’s always, I don’t know how essential it is to the music but it’s all part of the process of putting together an album.

NJD: Is this album called Congo because that’s somewhere that you’ve visited?

No. There’s a statue that appears on the cover of the album, and the statue was christened Congo. It was given to me as a gift when I was in Kenya. The little statue does actually come from the Congo and he’s been sitting on top of the right hand speaker of my hi-fi system all the way through the mixing process. There’s a little sphinx that someone gave my wife as a gift on the left hand channel and Congo on the right hand channel, and the pair have been kind of like the totems for this album, kind of overseeing the whole thing. It’s got something about it, a real personality. I’m always a little bit suspicious about “concepts”, but it’s definitely contributed to what I see as an underlying theme to this album. It’s the notion of this very distinctive totem that has come from a very different and very unusual part of the world and ended up in this little cottage outside of Cambridge. If there is a concept it’s about the exotic in a small, domestic traditional English setting – the kind of clash of cultures that’s going on there. Continue reading →