For our first Norman Records podcast excursion, we’re lucky enough to welcome Huddersfield artist WANDA GROUP, pride of Opal Tapes and maker of wonderful avant-garde mush. Also known by another name that isn’t spelt out in caps lock and therefore isn’t at all fun to type out, WANDA GROUP has been releasing an endless stream of recordings and compositions over the past few years, offering stretched out day-to-day sounds, vignettes on decay and unrelated words strung together to form silly sentences.
While he maintains a convincing superhero identity as that dude who makes up stories on the internet all day and then yells them at you in caps lock, give or take various swears, WANDA GROUP moonlights as a sound artist. Picking from his endless resource of field recordings -- I’d shy away from calling them found sounds, since it feels more like they’re constantly orbiting around him, like sage spirit animals -- he creates ambient netherworlds that keep you warm with a crackling fire of hiss. Mixed-metaphors aside, he recently contributed new music to the soundtrack of ‘Symirroretry’, a documentary about skateboarding, offering his usual dosage of ruminating grain and onomatopoeic noises.
We asked WANDA GROUP to make us our inaugural mix, and he was wonderful enough to fuck with our format before we’d even got started, offering us a brand new piece of his own music instead. It’s called ‘ACCEPTING THE TONGUE OF GOD’, a forty minute sound collage that begins with harsh, grainy textures before incorporating samples of piano chords, babies crying, kids shouting over high frequencies, and what sounds like anonymous objects hitting various floors. Like all WANDA GROUP pieces, it’s a modest behemoth of sound: through swirling, hissing drones, a whole new ecosystem is created. Or some shit like that.
Artwork by some dude named Louis Johnstone, who may or may not be affiliated with WANDA GROUP.
