#sonescent

Matchess - Sonescent (2022)

https://www.dragcity.com

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

Matchess - Almost Gone [Excerpt] (Sonescent, 2022)

Official Music Video / https://www.dragcity.com