Ramon Navarez is also known as j.o.y.s., which stands for “Jump Out of Your Skin.” It’s an acronym for stepping out of your comfort zone and trying on something new. For Navarez, that meant teaming up with has pedal steel-playing pal Justin Gaynor to finally put the musical improvisations they’d been creating into a self-titled album of intriguing ambience.
“dastardly” opens the album with simple synth chords and guitar drone notes that swirl like a vortex opening in space and time. The bending of time was a central theme while Navarez and and Gaynor were creating the album, and they nailed the feel of it right away. “yucca valley” is perfect for desert meditations, as it seems to stretch beyond your senses and center you in stillness.
“river / road” curls along for over eight minutes, with Gaynor’s pedal steel helping your brain drift like a leaf on the water and your hand sway up and down outside the car window as you drive at a leisurely pace. Speaking of water, “blue water prison” is something you won’t mind being in, as it washes over you and then drains away tension.
The guitars on “lee & leo” are reminiscent of lonely border towns or nearly empty roadside diners on a side highway. “heights” almost fades out before sliding back in to bring you back to Earth. The long title track is a back-and-forth conversation between Navarez and Gaynor’s guitars while quiet synths moderate them. By the time we get to “96 (jumping cholla),” we’re either falling into or awakening from a dream.
It’s a lovely record, and a nice meditative journey if you’re looking for one.
“heights” is the second single from j.o.y.s.– the moniker of Ramon Narvaez’s ambient project. j.o.y.s. is an acronym for “jump out of your skin” – an apt expression for Narvaez’s project that views the album as a documentation and definable marker of a life always in flux.
From Ramon on “heights”:
“heights” is the second single from j.o.y.s. Broken into two parts, it follows myself and my collaborator Bestamo as we contemplate our residencies in the neighborhoods we existed during the making of this record; the neighborhoods of Boyle Heights in Los Angeles and Crown Heights in Brooklyn. As with our previous single, we meditate on this instrumental music with a companion poem:
“well no shit, i’m like sisyphus,
because unlike many in this metropolis,
my parents are not funding this.
it’s all a near miss, to wait here wishless;
on a waitlist for a wish list,
just because i’m your one puerto rican friend,
doesn’t mean you’re not a little bit racist.
and just because i’m puerto rican,
doesn’t mean i’m not participating in the inevitable gentrifying of all of it.
awake from a sound sleep, there’s no forgiveness.
our disease is our disease.
on my knees, no company to keep.
you say it can’t always be a crisis,
when it is in fact, constantly a crisis.
gliding between life and death,
but i digress, i guess.
this one goes out to boyle heights, humboldt park, crown heights and all the rest.”
After years of trying to maintain some semblance of an art life while maintaining odd jobs, I began thinking of how truly difficult it can be to not have extra financial help while the cost of living rises seemingly indefinitely. This triggered the unfortunate realization that some of the people I chose to call friends were able to continue to live in these ever gentrifying neighborhoods due to some form of immense privilege. All the while playing a part in the suppressing of the innate culture within and living in a place with “affordable” rent myself only contributed to my ambivalence further.
It’s prompted me to look a bit more closely at what it means to be a somewhat assimilated Puerto Rican person having spent time growing up in central New Jersey and the Bronx, all the while the under the continued pressure conform to a society in a country that has bastardized the island where my true mixed ethnic roots originated.
How far have I distanced myself from the eleventh floor of a high rise on Bruckner Boulevard in the Bronx that my grandparents rented? The one that always smelled of Puerto Rican cooking and had doors that remained open to the little community within the building. How many of those communities are continuously being uprooted by a greedy developer so those aromas of home cooking are replaced with some hack instagram recipe cooked by a tech bro that pays $4000 a month to live out his dreams of big city adjacent livin’?
The cover art features a reenactment of orcas attacking a yacht which signifies to me a true act of mother nature hopefully get us all back on the right track. A track where “community” isn’t some sort of performative buzzword.
Love,
Ramon 2025
—
While ostensibly an ambient record, the musical touchstones of Ramon Narvaez and his collaborator Justin Gaynor span from 90’s alternative and the gnarliest of shoegazers to Daniel Lanois’ seminal Goodbye to Language. These expressions are presented unpretentiously on j.o.y.s. highlighting the serpentine path out of the New Jersey hardcore scene to Narvaez’s current home in Los Angeles. Both scenes live and converse on this record. Brutalist slabs of noise are stretched across the desert landscape and met by elegiac pedal steel.
The album is presented beautifully. A 14 page companion zine comes with a poem written by Narvaez for each composition. The result is a metacommentary and trenchant observation of being a D.I.Y. artist in the world of celebrity artists, trust fund modular synth bros and A.I. generated ambient music.
