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.
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.
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.
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.
