Closed For The Festival is the fourth full‑length statement from Canadian producer MIDI Janitor, the moniker of Jonathan Orr, and the first to appear exclusively on Toronto label We Are Busy Bodies. Functioning as a strange, sidelong autobiography, the album is framed as a biography of Orr’s shadow self - the version of him shaped by half‑remembered rituals, misheard hymns and the peculiar silence of rural childhood. Following the cult‑favoured Holy To Dogs LP, which began life as a cassette on legendary Vancouver imprint Hotham Sound before being reborn on vinyl, Closed For The Festival pushes further into a personal mythology of distorted memories and devotional electronics.
The record is rooted in Orr’s recollections of wandering Ballymore, Donegal, where he spent his early years on his grandmother’s Christian commune. Those days of open fields, improvised shrines and unstructured time bleed into the music not as straightforward nostalgia, but as a warped sensory imprint. Orr describes the songs as “always trying to get to that moment of taking your hand and walking you into the woods on a pretty spring afternoon and then abandoning you there to figure out ‘how do I get out of here?’” The result is an album that masterfully balances warped joy with sinister naivety, evoking the thrill of discovery and the unease of realizing no adults are really in charge.
Sonically, Closed For The Festival inhabits a dream‑logic zone that might recall the phantom electro of unreleased‑era Boards of Canada, the smeared chords and junkyard beats of late U‑ziq, or the off‑grid radio transmissions unearthed by Sublime Frequencies. But MIDI Janitor uses these echoes as driftwood rather than templates. Melodies wobble and detune like half‑remembered Sunday‑school songs played on a miscalibrated synth; drum patterns stutter as if built from misfiring toy keyboards and broken tape machines; background textures flutter with the hiss and hum of environmental recordings, like wind through cheap PA speakers outside a community hall. The tracks feel familiar without ever quite settling into the comfortable shapes of retro homage.
Crucially, the album resists any willful nostalgia. Each piece operates as an incantation to the “thin places” that have shadowed Orr’s life and creative work - those moments where the presence of an eternal elsewhere seems to seep into the present, when the world feels slightly overexposed at the edges. In these zones, a simple chord change can sound like a door half‑opening; a detuned jingle can become a message from somewhere you can’t quite name. Orr leans into this uncanny charge, letting naïve melodies bloom into something quietly foreboding, or allowing a seemingly playful rhythm to fray until it resembles a procession disappearing over a hill.
Across the album, MIDI Janitor cultivates an atmosphere that is both intimate and disorienting, like paging through a family photo album that has been badly reprinted, colours shifted and faces smudged. Synth lines arrive like visitors from another room, coated in the grain of cheap circuitry; bass figures move with a loping, homespun swagger that hints at folk dances filtered through malfunctioning samplers. Yet underneath the textural play lies a clear emotional through‑line: a desire to understand how childhood landscapes - spiritual, physical, sonic - keep echoing long after we have left them behind.
Closed For The Festival feels less like a linear collection of tracks and more like a circuit of returns, circling the commune, the woods, the half‑imagined gatherings where faith, fear and playfulness blur. In scoring the biography of his shadow self, MIDI Janitor invites listeners into those thin places with him, offering a record that is as hospitable as it is quietly unsettling - a spring afternoon that slowly reveals the labyrinth hidden inside its bright, welcoming light.
