Matchess - Between meditation and dream

For more than a decade Whitney Johnson has been a presence on Chicago's underground music scene. Trained as a classical musician, she was drawn early on to punk and psychedelia, going on to collaborate with a huge range of acts, both rock and psychedelic (Ryley Walker, Bitchin Bajas, Oozing Wound, Circuit Des Yeux) and experimental (Verma, Simulation, Damiana). She has worked with minimalists such as La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela, and alongside her music has pursued a path of academic and social commitment that has led her to run literacy programs, work with refugees, and earn a master's degree in cultural policy and a PhD in sociology. 

Her solo project Matchess has arrived, after the trilogy “Seraphastra” – “Somnaphoria” – “Sacracorpa” released by Trouble In Mind between 2015 and 2018, at a new work titled “Sonescent”, this time released by Chicago's own Drag City. We caught up with Whitney to find out more about the genesis of her fascinating new work, to learn about her compositional approach both as Matchess and in the many projects she's part of, and to understand how meditative processes can carry such powerful creative force.

Hi Whitney. I've always been drawn to the spiritual force of your music – the mental process of stepping away from rationalization in order to embrace the unknown, the mind wandering beyond the knowable. Does the Vipassana meditation that inspired “Sonescent” complete this process by uncovering, within the body itself, almost magical sounds arising from our deepest inner sensitivity?

Absolutely. Vipassana meditation teacher S. N. Goenka stresses that the practice itself isn't “magic” at all – it's simply the act of observing sensations in your body. But something remarkable happens when you perceive the electrical charge of the empty space between particles at the atomic level. That kind of sensitivity unlocks a hidden consciousness that can be unsettling, creative and dangerous. Even though my mind was focused on bodily sensations, I had the feeling that uncontrolled cognitive activity was happening in the background.

Across all your projects (from Via Tania to Verma, from Simulation to your collaboration with Circuit Des Yeux), how useful has your classical training been? And how does your approach change from one project to another?

European classical music was the first musical language I learned, and I still draw on it for a lot of collaborative projects. It's a familiar way of communicating, but it's more useful for some projects than others. For instance, with Laura Callier aka Gel Set in the Simulation project I relied on that language less, but with Circuit Des Yeux, on the other hand, Haley Fohr really took that direction to heart for the string parts. I want to be a musical polyglot, and all these different collaborations are like an immersion in different ways of communicating.

As a professor and a musician, how do you manage to balance your social commitment and your PhD in sociology with your life as an established musician?

The relationship between my different professions has changed a lot over the years. I used to think of my life as a sociologist strictly as a day job to support my music-making, but over time the two lives have been merging. I studied sound art for my doctoral research, and now I'm working on a postdoc at Uppsala University on sound and gender. These ideas blend together as I make music, and what I've experienced as a musician is the foundation for the writing I do in that other field.

You're a very vision-oriented artist – listening to “Sonescent” on headphones, at night, felt like a psychotherapy session: it brought up fragments of half-lost memories, stimulated me and moved me, made me search for hidden inner realities. Was that your intention – to create sounds coming from your mind's slow drift through the body, to stimulate the listener's own personal meditation?

I think this record works in two ways. One is passive listening, when you simply listen to the music while doing other things. In that mode, the music, left gently in the background, can subtly alter your surroundings and put you in touch with a higher level of reasoning. Active listening, as you describe it, is the best way to experience this record! For me, that mode opens up a deep, dark void in which images, sensations and feelings materialize. Some of them surprise me, and not all of them are easy to face. I hope this process of revelation is a way for people to experience the hidden reality of their own minds.

What was the compositional process behind the two long tracks on “Sonescent”? Were other musicians involved? How was it recorded, and what instruments did you use?

This compositional process was unlike anything I'd done before. I started by writing the songs for the PHB (Purgatory House Band), made up of Haley Fohr, Rob Frye, Tim Kinsella, Kalina Malyszko and Brian J. Sulpizio. The instrumentation was: 12-string acoustic guitar, electric guitar, bass, drums, clarinet, flute, violin, viola, cello, organ and voice. It was a process that took forever, because I wrote out every detail of an entire 36-minute record, one that can barely be heard tucked inside “Sonescent”. Well, actually every detail except the drums – I'm not good at writing drum parts on a 5-line staff. I also wrote the lyrics for the whole PHB album. So, with those scores and MIDI demos in hand, I brought the musicians in to record at Chicago's Experimental Sound Studio, and we did some overdubs at home. Brian J. Sulpizio helped me mix that record as if it could be released on its own. With those six tracks in hand, I made the other record: sine waves, Arp Odyssey synth, no-input electronics, field recordings, and so on. That record could probably also exist on its own, I suppose. Putting them together was very difficult, and we had to remix the PHB record so the low frequencies wouldn't get masked. I did the final mix, merging the two records into one. Mastering was also a challenge, because I didn't want the PHB songs to end up sitting more in the foreground than they should.

The Chicago scene has been truly extraordinary for many years now, from its more straightforward sounds to jazz and rock experimentation. You yourself have collaborated with Cooper Crain, Ryley Walker, Haley Fohr. Do you feel part of the scene? And is the fact that you more often collaborate with women artists just a coincidence, or do you feel there's a special bond between women?

I only collaborate with people who genuinely respect me. I'm not just interested in the respect owed to me for existing as a musician, but I want to work with people who are actually invested in my musical choices, who admire my thinking, and share some of my tastes. Basically, everything has to be built on the fact that they think I'm exceptional and, at the same time, I think they're fantastic: for me, mutual admiration is the foundation of free collaboration. It's very painful to realize that someone you thought genuinely respected you actually sees you as fundamentally inferior, whether that judgment is based on your gender or anything else.

You've rarely toured. Do you think you'll manage to take "Sonescent" around the world? And if so, with which musicians and what setup?

Things are still pretty unclear given the situation. In any case, I always add tour dates to this link on my website.

Memory played an important role in shaping the record. Does the viola, which seems submerged by the keyboards and drones before resurfacing, represent figures of the mind drawn up from the unconscious, only to fade away again, surrendering to memory?

My viola is an appendage of my body, more intimately connected to me than any other body or material object. We breathe the same air and share cellular structure through our daily connection over 20 years. I initially wrote the viola as the main melody for PHB, not knowing whether I'd want to sing or not. Some of those melodies stayed in the viola, while others were lifted into the vocal lines. The viola is more deeply connected to my unconscious mind than to my voice.

Your albums as Matchess always have an imaginary name. What does "Sonescent" mean? And how are the track titles tied to the experience of Noble Silence? Particularly the "wall" in "Through The Wall".

"Sonescent" is a play on words. Senescent means aging, growing old, or deteriorating, and Sonus is the Latin root for noise or sound. "Sonescent" captures the final minutes of music's life. You can hear the music itself taking its last breaths in the world of sound. Staring at the wall has become a central figure in my life and in my music! Right as I was starting to write this record, the single-story building next to mine was torn down and the family living there was evicted by a real-estate developer. I watched these greedy, money-hungry people build a concrete wall right outside my bedroom window, about 30 centimeters away — to squeeze out every available square foot for these condos. I stared at that wall for months while writing this record.

The cover image reminded me of the handcrafted work passed down through older generations. What does the cover photo specifically represent?

I wish there were more documentation online of Ike Floor's glazed ceramics! This piece is a massive crocheted clay work — maybe 36" in diameter — glazed and fired, then photographed. I had seen Ike's work for many years across many different media, and these glazed ceramics left me speechless. At their solo show at Happy Gallery in Chicago, we talked about doing something together, and Ike kindly created this piece. David Sampson photographed the front and back for the LP's front and back cover. You can see the glaze worn away on the back side. I can sense something aged in the crocheting process, something that evokes the final days of life — perhaps a senescent sculpture, a way of understanding the last minutes of music's life.

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