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Cassette
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DC 923Z-CS
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"The work of Whitney Johnson a.k.a. Matchess, is, in their own words, 'a material history of reproduction.' From our grateful vantage point, it sounds like sequences of hypnotic and engaging forms, a combination of musical concepts and available materials for the purpose of transcendence. Hav (DC 923A-LP) and Stena challenge linear description, and even language, reflecting the perceived values and details of multiple times/intentions/places into essential aspects, repurposed as music. Hav and Stena began to exist in 2021 while Whitney was researching the Cult of Hermaphroditus and visiting all the available sites of the cult's activity in Cyprus and Greece. She collected materials from the sites via VHS footage, 35mm photos, and field recordings. The cover image for Hav is from that trip, as are some of the field recordings included on Stena. During her travels, Whitney read Shelley's Frankenstein for the first time. As a sequel to that harrowing moment, and with respect to Shelley, the two new releases feel within and without themselves like creatures of post-mortem assembly, collaged more than birthed. Stena in particular sifts through fragments of once-was, surgically bonded and given electric shock treatment to induce music. Its sequence contains a hidden cover of The Nuns' 'It's a Dream.' A lot of Stena was recorded in Miller Beach, Indiana. Other recordings were made in a barn in rural Sweden during the winter of 2022, where Whitney was living alone and working on music while mulling over considerations of biological and symbolic ancestry. The cover image for Stena is a burial cairn photographed while there. As with 2022's Sonescent, one way to examine these records is how they resonate in the body. Throughout their gestation, attention was given to the use of certain frequencies as a focused means of transport; the Solfeggio Frequencies, a conception in sound healing, are referenced often in these new works."
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LP
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DC 837LP
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2022 release. "Sonescent, the new album from Matchess, came to Whitney Johnson's mind while she was at the Dhamma Vaddhana Meditation Center just north of Joshua Tree, during a course of Vipassana meditation. This is a ten-day period that requires, among other codes of discipline, the practice of Noble Silence: silence of body, speech, and mind. As this practice settled in and around her, Whitney heard the things not always focused upon: first, tinnitus . . . then, breathing . . . the heartbeat, and another pulsing (something unknown, but familiar). So, she listened to the sound of her body. After a time, her mind became involved, and she began to hear songs. But as she was keeping to her vows, she wasn't able to write them down or sing them and record them. It was only after she'd returned from the desert that she wrote down what she'd heard, to the best of her ability. This experience recalled the feeling that Whitney had after her time working as an installation assistant at La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela's Dream House in 2016. During that period, they hung Jung Hee Choi's Ahata Anahata, Manifest Unmanifest X. The process and aesthetic she witnessed there took up residence in her, changing everything in the process. The Vipassana meditation experience felt like another such passage, destined to resonate long and deep. She decided to score the songs from the desert for other musicians to play, which was a departure from previous Matchess recordings, where she played and sang the music all herself. This process took a long while; first the scoring, drawing the pieces back out from herself based purely on memory. Then getting everyone together to play the music. Once she had them all finally fully captured, it seemed right to place the sounds back where they'd come from -- a silent space, upon which the songs sometimes only barely intrude, as if heard from a great distance. In the past decade, Matchess' music has traversed outer and inner space, searching patiently for the unseen world that exists behind the world that we see everyday. When compared with the present work, the trilogy of albums released on Trouble In Mind from 2013-2018 utilized Whitney's writing and playing abilities with relative extroversion; her mixes actively deploying instruments and songs in what might be called a traditional manner, the music tapping majestically into classical, folk, electronic and psychedelic antecedents..."
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