Closed For The Festival is MIDI Janitor’s fourth full-length and is the follow-up to the Holy To Dogs LP, which was originally released on cassette in 2024 on legendary Vancouver tape label Hotham Sound and then in a vinyl edition by Toronto’s We Are Busy Bodies.
Closed For The Festival will be the first MIDI Janitor record to be released exclusively by We Are Busy Bodies. The new album, Closed For The Festival, is a biography of Jonathan Orr’s shadow self. The album’s first single, ‘Sovereignty Figure’ is out today.
Born from memories of his childhood spent wandering rural Ireland in Ballymore, Donegal on his grandmother’s Christian commune, Closed For The Festival masterfully straddles the line between warped joy and sinister naivety. As Orr states, “the songs are 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?’”
Closed For The Festival recalls the dream-logic electro of Boards Of Canada’s unreleased era, the smeared chords and junkyard beats of late career U-ziq, and the long-buried treasures uncovered by the Sublime Frequencies label, but is never willfully nostalgic in nature – each track is an incantation in honour of ‘thin places’, where the presence of an eternal moment seeps into the present moment – the uncanny feeling of which has followed The Midi Janitor throughout his life and creative work.
Closed For the Festival will be released digitally and in a limited first vinyl edition of 300 on May 8th, 2026. Audiopile in Vancouver, Canada, will have a limited silkscreen cover version of the album available.