Context may in fact be applicable when introducing the music of Context, NA. For the past six years, the solo project of Toronto producer and multi-instrumentalist Jonathan Pappo – best known for his expressive drumming with Ducks Ltd., Scott Hardware, Lee Paradise, WHIMM, Hooded Fang, and more – has quietly hummed along in the background. Beginning as an outlet for Pappo’s short fiction writing before expanding into sound, the project fuses various poetic forms with spectral folk quiver, intimate musique concrète, and punctuations of emotional post-punk cacophony.

Context, NA’s third album Out of this World started as a series of iPhone 4 voice memos. After completing his 2018 album, Collapse, Pappo returned to the fragments of songs and garbled guitar parts recorded many years before on the machine in his pocket. Listening to his haphazard early forays into music, he became absorbed by a melody he’d forgotten. “I discovered that I had recorded seemingly hundreds of versions of the same riff,” says Pappo. “I found that really moving.”

Those decaying, distorted guitar strains were recorded on Pappo’s very first amplifier, which adorns the album’s cover. The dusty, bizarre, and unique sounding starter amp by Baldwin from the 1960s (reimagined by digital illustrator Omar Rivero) - acts as a motif through its 12 sonically diverse songs. Giving reverence to a time of inexperience by merging lo-fi and hi-fi recording techniques, Pappo has created a haunting, insular sound world in the tradition of The Microphones, Cindy Lee, or Eraserhead’s Lady in the Radiator.

“I was thinking about my musical roots and the naivete of making something, but also the obsession with a melody or riff that won’t escape you,” he explains. “The title appeared to me midway through recording. I knew that I needed to get out of this world because I can’t live inside it forever.” This desire for escape evolved into the album’s other core concept: beginning from the perspective of the personified amp, opener “Dawn (Song For BPMC1)” introduces a distorted version of the melody that re-appears in its closing title track. “When I sing ‘what do you want out of this world?’ it’s like I’m asking the album what it wants from me,” Pappo laughs. “The joke is that you can’t get out, because when you finish the record you’re right back to where you started.”

Out of this World’s lyrics focus on moments that have led to Pappo identifying as an artist, the ways in which his life has been enriched by fellow members of his creative community, and capitalist forces co-opting the language of wellness. “Pure Life®” takes its name from the slogan of Nestlé water bottles, and was written about DuPont’s contamination scandal, yet you’d be hard pressed to guess listening to the twinkly post-rock incantation. This feels strikingly different from “Culminate (date 12.1)”, a tender electroacoustic pop song based on the dissociative episode that Pappo suffered after his first solo show. “Obviously the record is all over the place, but I like that,” he says. “It’s very experiential.”

Ushered in with pitch-shifted vocals and hallucinatory stereo-panning drum fills, “The Gate” is another spellbinding standout. Emerging from an improvised recording with cellist and experimental vocalist Zoë Alexis-Abrams, the mantra-like soundscape expands into a vast corridor of possibilities. “There’s a philosophical concept where you open a door and feel happy about discovering something new, but then the gate closes behind you, and you’re trapped inside,” explains Pappo. “Then you find another gate, discover something new, and the first gate closes again. It’s the endless process of entrances and exits.”

Near the album’s conclusion, Pappo’s voice takes on an achingly sincere tone as he dedicates “Oath” to his Hooded Fang bandmate April Aliermo, a politically outspoken artist and polymath talent. The sundazed rock song song sounds (relatively) straightforward on the surface, yet its airy synths cast a strange light onto languid strums that are not what they appear to be. “I was thinking about people who have changed my life for the better and literally redirected my oath,” says Pappo. “Some of the sounds are electromagnetic waves that sound like roaring guitars, but it’s actually my computer under a special microphone that picks them up, which my dear friend April generously let me borrow and taught me how to use.”

By the time the album reaches its expansive nine-minute title track, the dimensions contained in the common idiom out of this world have been explored both sonically and lyrically. Its 12 songs are organised into four thematic suites, each representing states of being: (1) the sublime, wonderment, awe; (2) the alien, inhuman, science-fiction; (3) to birth, of the earth, dirt; (4) to pass, leave, disappear. “These are for better or for worse very personal recordings,” concludes Pappo. “They’re almost naively sincere in some ways. I tried to combine all of these reference points to create something I like, which is usually a maximalist mess. I love to create layers of sound where there are intrusions.”

The album will be released by Pappo’s new label Remains Records, a hub for personal projects and experimental releases that may not find a home anywhere else. “I’ve always appreciated when an artist can’t find someone to release their music and decided to do it themselves,” he says. “Remains speaks to my philosophy about music: appreciating the things that have been left behind.”

Jesse Locke