More music from the man behind Joy Electric

From 1994 to 2012, Ronnie Martin released 14 albums and 11 EPs under the name Joy Electric, claiming practically every inch of CCM’s analogue-synthesizer turf in the process. It’s a claim he continues to stake despite retiring the Joy Electric brand in 2021.

“I do a lot of writing now,” Martin says, “and I write under my own name. So I thought, just to bring a greater sense of cohesion to all the work that I’m doing, maybe it’s time to do it all under my own name.”

The writing to which he’s referring isn’t songs but books with titles such as Finding God in the Dark (2013 with Ted Kluck), Stop Your Complaining (2015), and The Unhurried Pastor (2024 with Brian Croft). As a pastor and church planter with the Evangelical Free Church of America for nearly a decade, he’s well suited to the task.

Consume Like a Moth What Is Dear Ronnie Martin

But he’s still writing—and recording—songs. Consider the eight on his new album Consume Like a Moth What Is Dear (Velvet Blue). The follow-up to 2021’s From the Womb of the Morning, the Dew of Your Youth Will Be Yours, it’s the second in what he expects will be a three- or four-album series based on Old Testament wisdom literature (mainly Psalms). And, yes, its minor-key melodies, layered vocals, and swooshing, splooshing synthesizers sound a lot like classic Joy Electric.

“This album was kind of a throwback,” he says. “It was a recapturing of my original vision for making this kind of music, which was using just analog sequencers and synthesizers to produce and program every single sound that you hear.”

Martin traces his love for synthesizers to Depeche Mode, New Order, and After the Fire, music that he was exposed to as an ’80s teen. “There was something about the sounds and the nature of that music,” he says. “On one hand, it was kind of beautiful, emotional, melancholy. On the other hand, it had a sort of machinelike quality. It wasn’t sloppy. There was a perfection to it. And somehow all those interlocking sequences appealed to me.”

“Beautiful,” “melancholy,” “machinelike,” “not sloppy”—Martin may as well be describing his entire body of work.

“I always envisioned, like, what if you were a band that never changed?” Martin says. “What if you were one of those artists that never ever went outside the parameters that you established for yourself? That was kind of the big idea behind these records that I’ve been doing for so many years.

“They’re not for everybody,” he says, “but if you like this one thing, you’re gonna get a lot of it from me.”