Matchess - Stena (Cassette)

The work of Whitney Johnson aka 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 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. It hit deep - she'd referred to Matchess's previous release, Sonescent, as "the last minutes in the life of music." 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.

In the fall of 2023, thanks to a grant from DCASE in Chicago, Whitney returned to Sweden to finish both records as an artist-inresidence at Inkonst in Malmö and at Elektronmusikstudion (EMS) in Stockholm. During this time, she assembled the pieces she was working on as a multi-channel A/V installation at Inkonst, and Hav emerged more fully, as a composition for sine waves, marimba, viola, Arp Odyssey and Halldorophone.

Finished mixes for both were later achieved at Electrical Audio in Chicago with Cooper Crain, capturing the spirits and intents in all the times and places enumerated above. Fleetingly and forever, they become the sounds we hear on Hav and Stena.

Perhaps the best way to think about these two releases is the idea of doubles: doppelgangers, alter egos, evil twins, mirrors, polarities, impostors, shadows. Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde. Dr. Whitney Johnson and Matchess. The upstanding citizen who is given money to be a researcher and the deranged artist whose passions can do harm to others. Mental disturbances that take the form of others - and, how these selves appear in Whitney's Lacanian psychoanalysis.

As with 2022's Sonescent, another 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. This is the crux of it - as Whitney notes, "It's about my body being necessary for survival and yet enemy number one. Because that's the part that is always dying. And my body is also what makes it possible to listen to music, so I love it. I think about sound/music as something that happens in my body rather than something that can be explained with words. Sound is so amazing and insane, the way it is just pressure on air that ripples onto your body, [into] your ears, and then it becomes this entire meaningful system that defines our lives."

Hav is available to independent retailers on LP and Stena is available to independent retailers on cassette.

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Tracklist:

1. Biskopskulla Högstena
2. The Dew of Sickly Sentiment
3. In the Bed of Ivy
4. Klara Kyrka
5. Death in Trafo (or, The Crater)
6. Existe
7. DB
8. In Sleep
9. Third Coin
10. DNA Repair