Audiopile Review: Still riding high from last year’s Bulk Order cassette, also issued via Hotham Sound, Vancouver’s own MIDI Janitor strikes while the iron is hot, pulling more gems from his coffers with another ace set of smeared tonal ambience and upcycled lo-fi IDM. Once again MIDI Janitor hits upon a similar zone as his Hotham Sound boss, Mount Maxwell, both drawing on the palette set by Boards of Canada nearly 30 years ago. It’s a sound that we’re absolute suckers for and both artists have put their own stamp on it. But where Mount Maxwell is more likely to sink into the ambient abyss of the nostalgic timbre, allowing the textures to lay thick upon our skull, MIDI is far more restless. From the clattering percussion knockout of “No Division Between Sayings”, the blown-out sonic skitter of “Far Speak”, or the thickly woven synth soundtracking of “Channel Ridge”, his ecstatic display of complex but head-bobbing rhythms is emblematic of the more frenetic era of pre-Music Has the Right to Children BoC. Edition of 70, now sold out at the source. Admittedly, this well suited for the cassette format, but damn, does this ever scream out for a vinyl edition. Someone? Please?

Using only a scavenged MIDI keyboard and sounds plundered from a wide swath of archaic media (90’s sampler CDs, 80s VHS docs, 70s student films) musician Jonathan Orr creates startlingly accomplished slabs of thick, lo-fi electro that shimmer and pounce like nothing else on the Vancouver scene. As on his previous release (2023’s ‘Bulk Order’) the spiritual template here is the early unreleased tapes of Scotland’s Boards of Canada, particularly the twin holy grails of ‘A Few Old Tunes Vol 1 & II’, but this time around things feel noticeably weirder and more destabilized, as if that template were cracking apart under the weight of older, less definable influences.

The title of the album is taken from the Gospel According to Thomas: “Give not that which is holy to dogs, in case they throw it onto the dunghill.” Reading the text on the verge of sleep, Orr had mistakenly understood it as pertaining not to ‘holy things,’ but instead to things which were specifically ‘holy to dogs.’ What would such things be? Orr pictured a shrine of objects not valued by the world; garbage, refuse, decay, the discarded. Things forgotten or only half-remembered, like the rusted bones of ancient cities or the clips of dead media entombed on his hard drive.

‘Holy to Dogs’ charts a weaving course through this narcoleptic vision, from the bright epiphany of ‘Petroglyph Park’ to the blackened repetition of ‘Roman Concrete’, the eerie momentum of ‘Split Foot,’ and the rhythmic hypnosis of ‘Far Speak’; each track building on the last in a series of audio snapshots of lost worlds, forgotten rituals, and discarded histories. An absolutely essential release from one of Vancouver’s brightest (and darkest) lights.