It’s not just the tone of the instrument that’s similar, but I think also the 1 chord of the song that matches Spirit in the Sky by [check my work on this:] Norman Greenbaum? Anyway it just threw me back to some of the genuinely goofy religious folks I knew in my hometown and it doesn’t stop me from wanting to recreate that song in this atmosphere. It could be for those wingnuts too. Anything for solidarity.

Winged Wheel - Cactus Club, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, May 12, 2025

They were awesome to begin with. But Winged Wheel seems intent on just becoming more and more awesome as the years go by. Now a sextet with members of both Water Damage and Sonic Youth in the fold, their second LP Big Hotel from 2024 remains in constant rotation, a perfect blend of motorik experimentalism and hazy melodies.

As you can see from their pedigrees above, these are very busy musicians with an array of other projects — so a tour is a rare and special thing. And saints be praised, the mighty Milwaukee Taper was on hand to record a sparkling tape of Winged Wheel earlier this month. The jams run free in fine fashion — it says something about the considerable chemistry between the players here that the exploratory 11-minute improv might be the high point, as Steve Shelley takes everyone to one beautiful plateau after another.

Whitney Johnson — Hav/Matchess — Stena (Drag City)

Matchess uses the moniker Whitney Johnson for the release Hav. It is an ambient album length work that seeks both to represent and heal the human body. Whitney uses both acoustic and synthetic means to express the wounds that accrue during the lifespan, as well as the warmth of repair. Arp Odyssey is the go-to for many who create ambient music, and it provides the harmonic underpinning of Hav. The purity of sine waves juxtaposes against the Arp’s rich tones, affording the electronics varied timbres, which are featured in the opener “Agora.” Whitney also plays the halidorophone, an electric cello, its bowed notes providing non-legato elements. The acoustic component consists of marimba and viola, supplying still more textural contrast.

The second movement “Dafni” uses the marimba to oscillate the same pitches that are being held on the Arp, an animated drone that is considerably beautiful. “Vari,” perhaps for variant, has polyrhythmic ostinatos in the marimba, with different held notes in the halidorophone and synth. “Kouklia” finds viola added to the proceedings, with octave repetitions set against bleeps and a number of descending sine waves.

“Amathounta” turns us back to the rich textures of “Agora,” this time with ascending glissandos. The marimba joins with the ostinato found in “Vari.” This movement in particular underscores the organic growth over the course of Hav’s music. The closer, “Kition,” accumulates still more material, overtone arpeggios prominent among them, into an ebullient coda. Hav’s celebration of the human in all its stages and its exhortation of repair are abstract concepts to conceive in music, but Whitney’s reuse of its component parts makes the topics palpable.

As Matchess, the artist uses a different collection of materials on the cassette Stena. While synths and sine tones are again prominent, found sounds make their way into the frame too. “Biskopskulla Högstena” begins the tape with long held drones. This segues into “The Dew of Sickly Sentiment,” in which the lower register is plumbed in a resonant octave. “In the Bed of Ivy” recycles descending sine waves, accompanied by a fetching chord progression played on synths. “Klara Kyrka” inserts found segments including distant helicopters and church bells. “Death in Trafo, or, the Crater” silences the bells with an abrupt, buzzy tone which is then morphed with pitch bends and multiplied in octaves, followed by pulsations and a repeating, short major key melody. At nine minutes in duration, it is the longest piece on Stena, and Matchess allows the various components to fade in and out, interrelating in various contexts. It is an expertly devised composition.

“Existe” and “DB” follow, miniatures with blowing wind, amplified guitar, and the aphoristic tune that has crept into previous movements. In “DB” the tune is taken down an octave and distorted almost beyond recognition, only to be followed by the whirring of helicopter blades. “In Sleep” starts out brusquely and then softens into a gentler demeanor in which wordless vocals can be heard against drones and wind. “Third Coin” contrasts the singing with strings, overlaps of the ubiquitous tune, and the whoosh of cabin pressure, ending with a buzz. “DNA Repair” concludes Stena with free-falling sine waves diving into the drone padding, followed by an extended passage of two-mallet marimba playing. Shards of buzzing interrupt occasionally, and the vibrato of the drones changes in speed. “DNA Repair” is gradually deconstructed, ending the recording with a single tone remaining held.

Hav and Stena are compelling documents, with Whitney Johnson/Matchess demonstrating a composerly approach to ambient music that is quite successful.

Christian Carey

Strange Case of Dr. Johnson and Matchess

BY JORDAN MAINZER

I’ve been covering Matchess at SILY for the blog’s entire existence, and almost every time I mentioned her for the first time in a piece, I referred to her by her real name as well, Whitney Johnson. In some ways, this is natural, basic journalism, but it was also influenced by my desire to clarify. That is, throughout the years, at times when Johnson has been part of a bill at a show or even one piece of an ensemble, I’ve seen her presence referred to with both her moniker and her name. She’s finally here to say that, at least from an artistic standpoint, the two are no longer interchangeable. Today, Matchess releases her new cassette of found sounds Stena, using her usual combination of synthesizer and viola. Also today, Whitney Johnson releases her debut album Hav, a voiceless exploration of the human body laden with, yes, viola and electronic instruments, but also marimba. Saturday, at Constellation, the two releases, both out via Drag City, will be celebrated by a quintet of Johnson, Haley Fohr, Lula Asplund, Jenny Pulse, and Alan Sparhawk.

Hav and Stena are different sounding records, but they’re also intimately related. The field recordings on the albums come from places where Johnson was doing research or participating in a residency, ranging from rural and Southern Sweden to Greece and Cyprus. She started to notice commonalities between the coastal areas, the landscapes, the rocks. Just as the inspirations between the two records merged, so does the result. The songs on Hav are arguably more “healing” sounding than anything on the solfeggio frequency-inspired Stena. “Agora” shimmers like a gong, while the chiming marimba on “Vari”, increasing and decreasing in volume and intensity, lulls you into hypnosis. Stena, on the other hand, is much more tactile and reminiscent of tangible sounds that can be perceived by our minds and bodies, from the distorted church bells of “Klara Kyrka” and the crickets of “Biskopskulla Högstena” to the plucked strings of “DNA Repair” and pulsating voice of “Existe”.

Hav and Stena diverge and intertwine all at once, just like Whitney Johnson and Matchess. And they’ll only continue as separate, but similar artists, in part thanks to Johnson’s position as Assistant Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, a tenure track job in the Art & Technology/Sound Practices Department. One class she’s teaching in the fall semester is, appropriately, called Doubles, and comes from her own practice, studying “mirrors, alter egos, polarities, doppelgängers, gender binaries, impostors, twins, and shadows” and exploring how it can turn into psychoacoustic illusion like binaural beats. Perhaps a century from now, it’s Johnson and Matchess that will be studied in a similar course.

Earlier this month, I spoke to Johnson about Hav and Stena, keeping a diary, field recording, being physically changed by music, and the importance of context in abstract art. Read our conversation below, edited for length and clarity.

Since I Left You: At what point did you know that Hav and Stena would become reflections of each other, released at the same time as a singular, but separate entity?

Whitney Johnson: I think that two different artists or different paths had been developing for quite some time, [but] not until I started making a record did it become clear [to me]. I started doing all my instillation work and more sound work under my own name, but [the listing] would say, “Whitney Johnson (aka Matchess)” for reference. Vice versa, that started happening, [listings] saying “Matchess is doing [such and such],” and then mentioning my name. A lot more live performances were still billed at Matchess, which makes sense for a lot of reasons, but when I started making these [records], I realized how different they had become. The idea of doing a no vocals, ambient record [like Hav] didn’t seem to fit into the Matchess world. There are no lyrics; even though the lyrics are always buried, they’re a big part of what inspires my work, symbols that keep coming up. Without having text or voice on Hav, I thought it was definitely something else. Also, bringing in marimba, because Matchess is mostly key-based instruments, synthesizers, organ, and then viola.

SILY: The albums are born from your stays in different areas. Stena, you were staying in rural Sweden, and for Hav, you had an artist in residency at Inkonst near the coast.

WJ: This is where they start to blend, because a lot of the field recordings that show up on Stena are from Cyprus and Greece, where I was doing research in 2021. Then, I was doing residencies in Sweden and research in Sweden for a few months, and a few different times I was there, the geographical influences started to blend, too. Places I didn’t naturally think of having much in common, suddenly I started seeing all these commonalities between these places: Coastal island culture is a big thing, and the landscapes were surprisingly similar.

SILY: In rural Sweden, you kept an online diary. Had you ever done that before?

WJ: Not really. I feel like that’s something social media facilitated. It was easy to drop something in there that was photos, impressions, less personal and more observation and documentation, like images of rocks and water. That’s what “hav” and “stena” mean in Swedish, “sea” and “stone.” So that became a theme of everything I was collecting. It also turned into this journal.

SILY: Before, had you treated field recordings as your journal, and now, do you feel like you have more ways of capturing where you were?

WJ: Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. I think in the past, field recording for me was a lot about the thing that was making the sound I was recording. “This is a river,” or, “This is a gutter. This is a windmill. This is something that sound this exact way,” recording spaces and not really having an object I’m recording, but more doing recording in a place. That made me lean into this more text, journal approach, too.

SILY: When did you decide the solfeggio frequencies were something you wanted to explore in your music?

WJ: This is part of a much bigger line of questioning I’ve had. What is the connection between sound and the body or bodies in general? There’s so much out there that’s pretty far out. I don’t want to say everything that’s true has to have scientific evidence. There are things that may be undiscovered. When stuff has no evidence, I’m kind of a skeptic. The solfeggio frequencies are something someone discovered in the 1970s, and their relations to the body are pretty wild. One is called “DNA Repair”; what could that possibly be? There’s the “Frequency of God”, so already, it’s outside the world of observational science. That’s part of this much bigger project, brainwave treatments, where I’m like, “What is the connection here?” Passing that question onto the listeners instead of answering that, posing a question with my work to say, “What if this is how this works? What do you experience? How does this affect you?” The solfeggio frequencies were in this line of questioning where, “If I use this frequency as the fundamental for this just intonation piece, is it any different than if I go 1 Hz higher or lower? If it’s 528 [Hz], what if it’s 529? Is it really that different of an experience?” I don’t know. It’s a lot about priming. It’s a lot about what people expect to experience.

SILY: Has your experience of how you think sound affects the body changed as a result of making these records?

WJ: Yeah, one thing that I can say for sure is tuning to something other than A440 feels significant to me. It could be because of my own history with tuning to that frequency for so long in classical music settings. It’s regimented in a way that feels confining or stifling. Opening that up and not using that as my fundamental on the viola feels really good. Almost having perfect pitch–not exactly, but I can pick an A440 out of the air and tune the rest of my instrument to it, but that became such a restriction. I used 432Hz for most of these pieces to open up the possibilities. There’s also some interesting dissonance that happens, when there is something that’s in 440, these beating patterns and things out of tune in a way I thought sounded cool.

SILY: To my non-trained ears, it’s cool when it creates somewhat of a syncopation, or in terms of the Gestalt principle of filling space that’s not technically there.

WJ: I’ve been thinking and doing some reading about missing fundamentals, which is a thing where if you build the harmonic series above something, you don’t even need to have that fundamental tone because your brain fills in the gap. It is kind of the Gestalt of sound.

SILY: It’s something you notice that you’re finding words or frameworks for that formalize it.

WJ: Absolutely. When I was working at Dream House many years ago now, I was having a very direct aesthetic connection to what I was hearing, and I didn’t understand it at all. I didn’t understand just intonation or other tuning systems. I was just wide open, wide-eyed, taking it all in, but I really liked what I heard. I knew it was lighting up some part of my brain that had never been scratched. I started to dig into what was going on and how it was composed, and it opened a whole new world.

SILY: Have you had the experience of feeling physically changed by live music, especially at an extreme volume?

WJ: Yes, absolutely. That happens to me just as frequently with noise as it does with some sort of sound healing, like gong bath. A really good harsh noise performance like Merzbow can feel just as cleansing.

SILY: Are the videos you’ve released so far made of footage you had collected while studying?

WJ: The video for “In Sleep” is completely from Greece and Cyprus, some significant rocks that are marked as ruins, part of some ancient structure, and a bunch of rocks that were mundane, or not a special rock. I liked putting those together in that video, where you can’t tell whether something’s a sacred stone or cultural heritage site or just a random rock. The other one for “Vari” was all footage from Sweden from the coast.

SILY: You really did switch around the sonic and visual references between the albums, even thought a lot of the track names are consistently referential to places. For instance, “Klara Kyrka” is a church in Stockholm. Are the church bells in the song from there?

WJ: Yeah, that’s a field recording of those, distorted and buried beneath many layers of fuzz. That was kind of fun, too, all these doubles that came up in this doubles project that were sometimes in line with the thing, and sometimes reversed or flipped. Sea and stones, Sweden, Greece and Cyprus regions, keeping them in line, but one thing will be out of place that draws your attention to the double again.

SILY: Did the experience of incorporating these field recordings into an album make you want to do it more in the future, wherever you might be studying, to establish that relationship between place and music in the same way?

WJ: Yes, that felt really good. A lot of it is pretty subtle. I played some of these recordings wondering what I would do with them, whether they were [more appropriate] for an installation setting. They’re almost silent, so it opens up an imaginative world. I did an artist talk where I played these recordings, and you couldn’t really hear much, but all I said was, “These are the recordings of these sacred sites for the cult of worshippers for the Greek diety Hermaphroditus.” Giving that much context, there was this whole imaginative thing that happened in people’s minds where they were listening to kind of nothing, but the sense of place and time added to the interpretation. I love [recording] wherever I’m going, or even just the sounds of my life, myself living.

SILY: Are you the type of listener who wants to know the context of what you’re listening to before you hear it?

WJ: I’m of two or three minds about it. Sometimes, I want to read something and know what it is first and have it guide me or give me something to hang on to or an anchor. [Other times,] I want to listen to something without knowing a thing. I feel the same way about film. Sometimes, I want to read about a film and understand what I’m getting into, but [other times,] I want to be totally surprised. It’s also cool, for something that’s time-based, to [read about it] while you’re listening. It actually puts my attention on the thing. If I’m listening to a record, looking at the liner notes or an insert or booklet, I’m having this experience of sound that’s integrated. It’s visual, textual, and listening, and you can make it into an experience instead of what for me is so often background music, [where] I’ll put something on and get up and do the dishes. [laughs]

SILY: I agree with you. I switch back and forth. I at least try once with everything, especially if I’m writing about it, to actively sit down and look at the context before or during the listening experience, even if the very first listening experience might be passive. For an ambient record, the possibilities are so vast, that it can be misleading if you go into it cold.

WJ: Definitely. There’s also space to respect the artist there, too. If somebody gives you a big conceptual statement, it’s important to incorporate that as much as you can. Some people really resist that, too, and say, “This is just sound or music. You can tell what an artist wants you to do with it.”

SILY: What else are you working on at the moment?

WJ: A few different things. I’ve got some film stuff coming up. There’s a new project I’m working on that involves field recording of my daily life. I feel like that’s pretty exciting. I can imagine it turning into an A/V installation project, but right now, it’s just collecting recordings. Field recording my life could be traveling but also at home, like cooking. There’s also a piece called FIAT I did in Berlin in 2023, and I’m proposing that to lots of people to do in 2025, to bring that back. To say it’s “fun” is weird, but it’s very transformative for me. It’s a 4-hour-long solo viola and electronics piece with no breaks. I’m seated, and my arm is moving repetitively between strings for four hours straight, and everything else I’m doing is with my left hand. I’m able to clamp my viola with my chin and be working with a synthesizer and any other electronics like a mixer to bring things in, but my right arm is just going for four hours straight. It’s really challenging and feels like public meditation. I’m trying to see where that can happen next.

SILY: Is there anything you’ve been listening to, watching, or reading that you’ve found inspiring?

WJ: I’m in the last pages of the new Rachel Cusk book called Parade. It’s incredible and life-changing. It’s about an artist named G, and the artist takes lots of different forms, so you don’t know if it’s one person or many artists named G. It might be different iterations of what an artist can be. It’s pretty abstract, but I’ve really related with several of the versions of G who I’ve encountered. The writing is so good, so incisive, a lot that’s directly about gender but a lot that’s not, just about art making generally. You see how through the storytelling, gender is a part of that, but there are very clear moments where you can see, “This is what it means to be a female-identifying artist.”

SILY: You’re teaching at SAIC now, including a class on Doubles. Has your teaching ever mirrored your music practice as much as it does now?

WJ: No, and I think it’s an opportunity of being full-time. I can design my own classes. It feels like such a privilege to speak for my practice.

Water Damage,

Hotel Vegas 7/14/24

Matchess, live at The Baby G in Toronto, July 2022

“Rhythmic, dense, propulsive, and penetrating, the album turns the dials through the greased neon glow of Flying Saucer Attack, the rain-streaked ache of Grouper, and the cloistered technicality of Cul De Sac.”

Raven SIngs The Blues on Winged Wheel’s ‘No Island’

YOU HAD US AT CLOISTERED TECHNICALITY

Matchess - Sonescent (2022)

https://www.dragcity.com

Matchess by Marzena Abrahamik.

https://www.dragcity.com/artists/matchess

Photo by Marzena Abrahamik

Given the conditions of its inception, it’s fitting that the listener must dedicate time and attention to Matchess’s new album, Sonescent, to tune into the artist’s intention. Whitney Johnson attended a 10-day Vipassana meditation retreat near Joshua Tree, California, where she conceived this 36-minute album from her self-imposed silence. Comprising two 18-minute pieces, Sonescent rewards close listening and can induce the kind of meditative awareness that inspired its creation.

It takes “Almost Gone” a long while to emerge from the silence. Gentle overlapping synth tones resound like gongs in the foreground, while a distant song plays in the distance, frustratingly out of reach. Hypnotic, sawing loops of Johnson’s viola begin to loom and assume dominance, building into almost ecstatic intensity, before ebbing away again amid uneasy synth tones that sound like jammed radio transmissions. The throb begins to feel like blood pulsing, evoking Johnson’s own experience of listening to her bodily rhythms during the retreat’s profound silence. It’s both glorious and unsettling. The distant song returns in the track’s final moments, like a half-remembered dream, but the immediacy of the body’s own sound world seems to take precedence. 

“Through the Wall” opens with the hum of what sounds like an electrical generator, wavering menacingly across the stereo field. As the hum eases in intensity, you can hear the grit of Johnson’s viola strings more clearly, her sawing drones moving between the channels in a disorientating way. As with “Almost Gone,” a distant rhythmic song seems to emerge and recede in the background, then move boldly to the fore. The song is still haunted by eerie, wavering tones, but you can hear the viola melody more clearly, only for it to recede again, just out of reach. This perpetual balancing act plays out across the piece’s 18 minutes, with Johnson mixing in radio interference, piercing and warbling tones, deep bass rumbles, and what sounds like elusive chanted vocals. At times the intensity ratchets up to a point where it almost becomes unbearable, only to ebb away again in a wash of relief. 

With Sonescent, Johnson offers a vivid demonstration of how tuning into our own unique frequencies can inspire music of uncanny physical immediacy and resonance. Ultimately, we’re all made of the same stuff.

Tim Clarke

Winged Wheel - No Island (12XU 134-1)   April 29, 2021

Winged Wheel is made up of four musicians whose worlds have intersected for years without them ever all being in the same room. Cory Plump (Spray Paint, Expensive Shit), Whitney Johnson (Matchess, Damiana), Fred Thomas (Tyvek, Idle Ray), and Matthew Rolin (Powers/Rolin Duo, solo) have been longtime participants in various d.i.y. communities, crossing each others’ paths through shared gigs, working on releases, or taking the stage at Cory’s small upstate NY bar. Each player has developed their own personal practice of improvisation and home-recording, and Winged Wheel began by chance when Cory asked Fred (drummer for Detroit summer punks Tyvek) to send over some rawly-recorded drum loops to jam over. Cory tracked rangy guitar and bass parts over these repetitive loops and songs slowly started taking shape. Matthew’s guitar layers took these foundations to a whole new level, and Whitney’s submerged vocal tracks solidified everything, elevating the project from a soup of partially formed ideas into something intelligible. The entire album was written, recorded, and mixed in remote collaboration, eventually turning into a balancing act of precisely arranging sonic details and maintaining the formless excitement the music began as. This paradoxical process can be heard in the final form of the album, a continuous zone that manages to be strange and amorphous while still carving out space for four distinctive musical personalities. It’s a sound that hovers and stumbles as often as it takes declarative turns in unexpected directions, the circles getting smaller the closer you zoom in.

preorder : https://wingedwheel.bandcamp.com
12XU.bigcartel.com

BY JORDAN MAINZER

When two black holes collide to make one bigger black hole, the result’s weight is less than the sum of its parts. This type of loss and transformation–including decay and death–has always been at the center of William Basinski’s compositions, real-time evidence of something fading away. There are, of course, The Disintegration Loops, the result of his attempt to transfer previous recordings to digital format that just so happened to occur right before 9/11. There’s his tribute to David Bowie on 2017′s A Shadow in Time, made from re-purposed tape fragments chewed up by his roommate’s cat, even a thoughtful tribute ultimately controlled by the forces of nature. And now, there’s On Time Out of Time, made from exclusive samples, courtesy of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), of those two aforementioned black holes merging 1.3 billion years ago. 

To hear Basinski perform this music live, then, as I did last Friday at Empty Bottle, seems in concept almost antithetical to his fascination with destructive chaos, though the source material seemed musical: Thuds of percussion became a more straightforward, pulsating drone, while the lighter timbres were almost horn-like, the type of soundtrack to a creation scene. And moments of almost silence were interrupted by only tape hiss. What was most effective about the set, though, was the mood. Barely visible behind hues of purple and blue, and wearing Matrix-esque sunglasses, Basinski appeared like a figure from the future. (“Where’s the fog? I’m not supposed to see any of y’all…Did they use it all on the opening act?” Basinski joked.) Despite the Bottle’s perennially sticky floors, much of the crowd set and let the music wash over them; I opted to stand and get lost staring at the moving projection of a skeleton on one of the venue’s walls, unintentionally swaying along to the waves of the music.

Matchess, the project of Chicago-based artist Whitney Johnson, opened for Basinski with similar attention to atmosphere and ambiance, lighting and blowing out a candle when the set began and ended, holding prism-like tuning forks up to her face whenever she would sing to make beating patterns from her voice; from a distance, it looked like magic. From propelling, panning bass to repeated viola strokes, her created drone was harmonic, hypnotic, and all-encompassing. If the records from, for instance, Johnson’s Trouble In Mind trilogy are more uptempo and electronic, shows like this one cement her as a spiritual peer of ambient masters like Gas’ Wolfgang Voigt and Basinski himself.

#matchess lp dispooshop (à Badseeds Recordshop)
https://www.instagram.com/p/Bnin9NYlNa2/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=2eu22ahhtf1u

Matchess

Photo by Evan P. Jenkins

BY JORDAN MAINZER

Seraphastra, Somnaphoria, Sacracorpa. They’re a trilogy of albums from Matchess, the experimental project of Chicago musician Whitney Johnson, but not your typical trilogy. They didn’t come out chronologically, for one–in between Somnaphoria and Sacracorpa (Trouble In Mind) was The Rafter (Monofonus Press). But more noteworthy, in between two and three, Johnson experienced and recovered from a medical emergency that gave her a more positive outlook on life and number three a distinctly lighter feel than the other two. Indeed, from the opening notes of “Of The Living”, you sense that Sacracorpa is groovy and breezy, more influenced by uptempo electronic music than anything Matchess has released to date. 

Last month, fittingly, Matchess played a release show at a venue centered around the body–literally–The International Museum of Surgical Science. But Johnson hasn’t given up exploring the mind, too. The reality is quite the contrary. By day, she’s a sociologist researching sound and the senses, how we understand what we hear. She just finished her phD at the University of Chicago and is teaching part time at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago as well as U of C. She’s spent time researching at La Monte Young’s Dream House, too. Really, though, Sacracorpa is the first Matchess record to achieve that balance between body and mind, music you can think about and physically feel.

Even if you’ve never heard Matchess, you’ve heard Johnson, whether on records by Ryley Walker or Circuit des Yeux or live with CDY. (She arranged strings on Reaching For Indigo; she has upcoming dates with CDY, including the performances of Haley Fohr’s original score for Salomé and potentially arranging strings and playing with Fohr and the Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra at Le Guess Who?) But to me, Matchess is the project that best encapsulates Johnson as a whole–the academic, the musician, the person.

I spoke with Johnson last month about her trilogy of albums, the links between her research and her music, and that interview she did with Wolfgang Voigt for the Reader. Read the conversation below, edited for length and clarity.

Since I Left You: Did you intend for the chronology of your trilogy of albums to be defined by the label that released it?

Whitney Johnson: It wasn’t intended ahead of time, but it kind of worked out that I finished [the first two], and [The Rafter] was kind of a separate thing. I was using mechanical instruments for a lot of the beats, and it didn’t fit on the trilogy. Monofonus [Press] approached me and asked whether I would want to do anything, and I pitched the release and talked to Trouble In Mind about it. They thought it was a good idea. But after I did it, a friend of mind pointed out there’s this Japanese narrative called Kishōtenketsu, which is a four-part thing without a conflict or resolution structure, and it kind of fits that. The third part is non sequitur, but the fourth kind of links it in.

SILY: What inspired this specific batch of songs?

WJ: I had finished The Rafter, and I was just starting to conceive this record. At the end of 2015, I had a medical emergency right as I was starting to make this record. It was right after I was healing from that I started recording it and writing it and getting it all together. It was about being grateful to be alive and recovering. That gives it a lighter and more positive feeling, whereas the others were more anxious. It feels more calm and optimistic.

SILY: Do you have a favorite track on it?

WJ: It’s so hard to say. The one I played the most live is the first one. It was the first thing I recorded. The last one is heavily inspired by Arthur Russell, so I love that track, too. It’s a departure. It feels like the last word of the trilogy, the departing song.

SILY: How was the album recorded?

WJ: I recorded it on my own. I have a practice space I work out of. I’m also a sociologist, so I have a sort of free schedule and work on my practice space a lot. In the daytime, it’s pretty quiet, so I’m able to record. I did the recording, writing, and tracking myself, and Cooper Crain mixed it and did a great job. We had a little back and forth about notes. Mikey Young ended up mastering it.

SILY: Do your experiences doing sociology research have a direct impact on the music you make?

WJ: They feel really distinct–my analytical, hard-boiled self is the researcher, and the dreamier, “pay more attention to the mysterious and unknown” is my music practice. But my dissertation research was mostly sound art, so sound that happened at museums and galleries. But I did ethnography on La Monte Young’s Dream House in New York. His work and composition and approach to sound and frequency has inspired my music, too. So that’s kind of a loose connection to my music.

SILY: What inspired the titles of the trilogy records?

WJ: They’re all taken from Marx–some from Capital, some from The Communist Manifesto. He has a really beautiful way of writing. Political writing can be kind of dry, and Capital is rigidly mathematic, but his writing is very beautiful in certain sections.

SILY: Were any of the lyrics inspired by his works?

WJ: Yeah. The idea of freedom coming through social connection as opposed to an individual well or individual competition. It inspires my music–I’m really collaborative. Not with Matchess, but with other projects.

SILY: Who does the cover art for your records?

WJ: This most recent one is Nina Hartmann. She went to [SAIC], and I met her there, but now she lives in Los Angeles. Before that, it was Carrie Vinarsky and Heather Gabel. Right now, there’s a cassette version of the trilogy that Trouble In Mind is doing, and Sara Drake did the artwork for that one. It’s in a clamshell. Classic new age tape style.

SILY: By the way, I loved your interview with Gas.

WJ: That was really fun! I sent a bunch of questions and thought he would pick a couple of them and give a detailed response. Instead, he gave short answers to all of the questions.

SILY: Is there anything you’ve been listening to, reading, or watching lately that’s got your attention?

WJ: Yesterday, I was listening to the self-titled record from Emitt Rhodes. It was new to me, but it really got my attention. I’ve been listening to a lot of 60′s/70′s music like The Byrds.

“The Fog” - Matchess

“Of Freedom” - Matchess

AllMusic Staff Pick:
Matchess
Somnaphoria
2015
Experimental Rock

Whitney Johnson’s second album as Matchess was the best album of 2015, and unfortunately it hasn’t received nearly as much attention as it deserves. Johnson melds trudging drum machines, hazy viola, and alien vocals into an haunting transmission from another galaxy.

- Paul Simpson