Audiopile Review: We Are Busy Bodies answer our pleas to have MIDI Janitor’s Holy To Dogs cassette pressed to vinyl, arriving a mere six months after it’s initial appearance. A Christmas miracle, some may say. But Holy To Dogs was far too good to be left out of print and out of reach on its small format, an edition of 70 that disappeared pretty much the same week it arrived into the world. It’s clear now that Holy To Dogs’ head rush of grainy IDM and smeary tones, an update on the BoC template fired off with his own DIY flair, was meant for a much wider audience. That said, this pressing is a limited affair from WABB, an edition of 300 that surely will not stay in print for long. One of our favourites of 2024, no doubt.

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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 & Il’, 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? Orrpictured 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.