22, A Million

Official Review

Justin Vernon's third album under the Bon Iver name, recorded after a period of near-withdrawal from the music scene following the success of the project's self-titled second record. Vernon deliberately breaks with the acoustic-folk aesthetic that had defined his public image — born with the debut album For Emma, Forever Ago, recorded in isolation at a hunting cabin in Wisconsin — to build a record based on sampling, vocal processing through tools like the Messina (a vocal processor developed specifically with engineer Chris Messina), and titles composed of numbers, symbols, and non-standard typographic characters instead of words. 22 (OVER S∞∞N) opens the album with Vernon's voice fragmented through a vocoder and layered over itself in irregular loops, while 715 - CR∑∑K remains almost entirely a cappella, the voice electronically processed until it loses any residual acoustic warmth. 33 "GOD" alternates a sampled gospel piano with bursts of processed saxophone, while 8 (circle), among the record's most expansive tracks, briefly recovers the melodic intimacy of earlier work before the album fragments again toward its close with 00000 Million. The connection to the CCRU here concerns the record's graphic and symbolic apparatus directly, more than its lyrical content: the titles — numbers juxtaposed with astrological, alchemical, and non-standard mathematical symbols (∞, ∑, ʇ, ♢) — function as a private numerological system that Vernon has stated is tied to personal experiences of recurring significance, an apparatus that treats number and symbol as carriers of operative meaning independent of their conventional mathematical function. It's the same principle by which the CCRU scene treated certain numerical configurations (23, for instance) as vectors capable of producing real patterns in the perception of anyone who observed them with sufficient attention — a system generating meaning through the accumulation of coincidence rather than through reference to a verifiable external source. 22, A Million marks Bon Iver's definitive turn toward a more electronic, fragmented production, one the project would deepen further on the following album i,i, and remains the record that forced critics to reconsider Vernon as an experimental producer rather than simply an heir to the American folk tradition he had started from.