Wobbly Interview: Going for Happy
BY JORDAN MAINZER
Thurston Moore Ensemble/Negativland band member Jon Leidecker has been releasing electronic music under the moniker Wobbly for over two decades now. In Chicago experimental label Hausu Mountain, he seems to have found kindred spirits, matching his far out idiosyncrasies. 2019ā²sĀ Monitress and its follow-up,Ā Popular Monitress, which came out earlier this month, are albums about and by machines, as Leidecker ran his music into pitch trackers and synth apps on his phones and tablets, embracing the errors and randomness that were produced along the way. While the source material on Monitress was mostly improvised, the songs on Popular Monitress are more structured and composed, resulting in songs likeĀ āAuthenticated Krellā, which follows a comparatively clean synth arpeggio before being enveloped by texture, orĀ āLent Footā, where the various instruments trail each other. Itās remarkable just how familiar certain sounds are even if not traditionally instrumental ones, like the typewriter clacks ofĀ āIlliac Ergodos 7!ā or the zooming notes of the thumping title track. Blurring the lines between whatās instrument and whatās not, and even further, whatās composed music and whatās not, Popular Monitress is a defining statement for both Leidecker and Hausu.
I was able to ask Leidecker about various songs on the album and their inspirations. Read his answers below!
Since I Left You: You chose to write more structured songs this time around before running them through the pitch tracker. Do those nuggets of recognizable structures make the final product all the more disorienting?
Jon Leidecker: Hopefully! On both albums, the main thing is keeping the focus on just how live those pitch trackers are. Itās Monitress as long as you can hear how theyāre listening. For years, it was strictly a piece for live performance--I needed to be improvising myself, and able to respond instantly, to really underline just how spontaneous the machine responses are. So the first record tried to keep more of that sense of flow. Large stretches of it are simply baked down from stereo recordings of concerts & radio performances of it. Overdubbing more layers of trackers seemed legal, as long all the voices were following that one original sound.
Of course, when you play a tune, something composed or even quantized, it definitely becomes easier to hear what theyāre doing. The exact same code running on each phone will respond in very different ways to the same source audio, and you get a chorus of individual voices. They play a lot of wrong notes, but oddly, if you feed the trackers lots of consonant, major chords, it stops being dissonance, and you can tell theyāre going for happy. You hear these weird things, trying to sing in unison, and..the result is just pure delight. Weirdly emotional! Whatās a mistake? Whatās music?
SILY: How did you come up with the song titles? For instance, is there anything particularly Appalachian about "Appalachian Gendy"?
JL: Theyāre mostly mashed up references to landmark works in the field of generative & algorithmic composition, from the 50ās up to the early 90ās. The recent push of stories on AI musical tools seems to be about automation and labor-saving, but the field of how to develop tools for more creative ends goes back all the way to Bebe and Louis Barron going to the Macy Conferences on Cybernetics and designing their first self-oscillating feedback circuit.
So while my tracks arenāt really in the musical style of the works they reference--something like Ā āAppalachian Gendyā, which sprung up a fantasy Spiegel/Xenakis tribute, got paired to that stompdown track, and once it did, I added a solo on iGendyn.
SILY: To what extent is your music here inspired by the inner workings of the brain?
JL: Once you get a grip on just how simply neurons and synapses interact, how reassuringly physical thinking is, the electronic music Iāve always found most inspiring often involve feedback systems, self-playing devices, generative music, things that learn rather than settle. Music that helps you model thought. The whole East Coast/West Coast 60ās divide in synth design boiled down to Moog reducing your options until you could easily dial in what you already know you want, and Buchla designing uncertainty machines to be networked together until they approach the complexity of an unknown brain.
SILY: "Synaptic Padberg" and "Every Piano" have moments of recognizable instruments as opposed to alien instruments (strings and piano, respectively). Was that just a product of the errors/randomness of the music-making, or purposeful?
JL: It's supposed to sound orchestral, so I hit my Mellotron and Chamberlin apps pretty hard with this piece. Not like anything remains plausibly real once they're getting hammered by the trackers. That is a real grand piano, however: me playing the tune at SnowGhost Music in Montana. Brett Allen deserves an engineering credit, but I also wanted the first listen to make you wonder.
SILY: There's almost a funky rhythm to "Motown Electronium". Do you envision folks dancing to this record?
JL: Would have been plain wrong to put that title on an unworthy beat. What would a room full of people dancing to this even be like? Maybe in Baltimore.
SILY: Do you think "Training Lullaby" is what a computer trying to write a lullaby would sound like?
JL: Not that relaxing, is it? Thatās ten seconds pulled from a five minute live improvisation, just a little burst of fury in the middle. Which Iāve heard enough now that I can sing along to it; so now, for me, it is calming.
I finally had to admit to myself that Iām a fan of the OpenAI Jukebox stuff. Itās right at that stage where their results are still primitive enough to remain a little mysterious. All the context and relationships intrinsic to what humans call music is irrelevant to those GANs. They donāt need culture to make music, they just need waveforms. What does it tell us that simple pattern analysis and brute number crunching on a large enough data set can produce those sounds? Theyāre training us. I have twelve hours of their Soundcloud dump ripped to my phone, and I play it a lot, though I wouldnāt play it for anyone under four. Can definitely sing along to some of the weirder ones by now.
SILY: How did you approach the order of tracks on the record? I'm struck by, for instance, the chaos of "Grossi Polyphony" following the comparative lull of "Every Piano".
JL: Just trying to show the range, and keep the surprises coming. Perpetual variety becomes monotony so quickly, so there is a very careful balancing act to play between shorter and longer tracks. I like a record where on first listen, any new section that begins, you feel like there are no guarantees how long itāll last, eight seconds or eight minutes. Even things that sound like they should be songs: no guarantees. I still remember the first time I heard The Faust TapesĀ as a teenager.
SILY: Did you actually use musical dice to write "Wurfelspiel"?
JL: āWurfelspielā is just name-dropping Mozartās generative piece--again, a real piano, but no musical dice involved.
SILY: The beats towards the end of the album--the pseudo hip-hop of "Cope By Design", techno of "Dusthorn Sawpipe", krautrock of "Help Desk"--seem to me to be far more propulsive than anything else here. Do you see a connection between those tracks?
JL: The album hits you with all these miniatures in the middle to keep things moving, and those three are the last little barrage of them before the shift into the final stretch with the longer, more hypnotic pieces. Can be tough to sequence an album when youāve got so many short tracks, but itās also total freedom.
SILY: How did you like getting the Hausu Mountain album art treatment?
JL: Totally family. All the Monitress packaging has always been iPhone panorama mode artifacts, visual glitches not entirely unlike what my phoneās trackers do to what they hear. I gave one of those images to [Hausu Mountain co-founder Max Allison] to work with the cover of the first Monitress, and he sent back this image, saying, āHereās the initial stage: Your photo reduced to color blocks Iāll carefully render out later.ā So when the second hyper-detailed one came back in a more proper Hausu style, they already seemed like a sequence, and this second one was already in place, so it all clicked. Any version of Monitress, the music is different, but itās always the same piece. Iām really happy they asked me for something. [Label co-founder Doug Kaplan] and Max are just coming from the good place.
SILY: Are you doing any live streams or socially distant shows any time soon?
JL: Multi-location live streams are a blast. The time modulation inherent in all streaming is deeply psychedelic. The kind of listening you have to do when you know that the relationship of sounds together in time is different for each musician involved? Iām learning utterly new tricks, and itās astonishing just how live the result is. I sat in on a live stream with Thurston Moore Group a few months ago, the four of them in London, and me hooked up to an amp not far from where I normally am when I play with them. And everyone agreed: It felt like I was there, right up until the instant I quit the app.
Iāve been pre-recording some home live sets for Hausu, Curious Music and High Zero Foundation. Negativland is putting together an hour long performance with Sue-C for the Ann Arbor Film Festival in late March. I finished an album mostly recorded outdoors with my old friend Cheryl E. Leonard for Gilgongo, and weāre going to try to a few outdoor concerts, too.
SILY: What else are you currently working on/what's next?
JL: The second album with Sagan, with Blevin Blectum & J Lesser, is coming out in late April. That one took 14 years to finish. Thereās a trio record with Thomas Dimuzio and Anla Courtis coming out on Oscarson. Doing a revision of the last episode of my podcast on sampling music, Variations, to incorporate that OpenAI music. Some Negativland releases tying together the last two albums. There are about four of five other albums that might be done, though it takes time to be sure.
SILY: Anything you've been listening to, reading, or watching lately?
JL: This month has been Maryanne Amacherās collected writings, Keeping Together in Time by William H. McNeill, Ministry For The FutureĀ by Kim Stanley Robinson, important even with happy ending. Interview with Karl Friston - Of Woodlice And Men. Ā Listening to a lot of āBlueā Gene Tyranny, Xenakis & Lang Elliott, and last week every GhĆ©dalia TazartĆØs album in reverse chronological order. I donāt care what anybody says: That guyās immortal.
SILY: Anything I didn't ask about you want to say?
JL: Thank you for your questions!
Popular Monitress by Wobbly
