Inspired by a stint in silent meditation, these two sidelong pieces attempt to wrest orchestral order from real-life chaos.
In the Summer of 2017, Whitney Johnson realized she had a critical problem: She could hear vivid new music in her head, but she had no way to record it—in fact, the very idea was verboten. Years earlier, Johnson, an enthusiastic collaborator who has long made spectral pop as Matchess, emerged from a near-fatal medical catastrophe with renewed clarity and urgency, wielding an appreciation for life and the art she might make with it. As seasons passed, those feelings faded; Johnson slipped back into the humdrum soup of daily existence. She decided to stanch her existential recidivism with an extended stay at a Mojave meditation center, where she would live in the “noble silence” of the Vipassana tradition. But then the music—rich orchestrations for a little symphony, curious little melodies—came. She couldn’t write them down, let alone sing them. She simply tried to remember.
Sonescent, Matchess’ debut for Drag City, doubles as Johnson’s fascinating document of that experience and the most absorbing piece of an already interesting catalog. When Johnson emerged from silence, she scored the sounds she’d heard in her head, then assembled a chamber ensemble of Chicago ringers (Circuit des Yeux’s Haley Fohr, Joan of Arc’s Tim Kinsella, Bitchin’ Bajas’ Rob Frye, and so on) to play them alongside her own viola and inscrutable but arcing vocals. The result, though, didn’t reflect how she’d first heard the sounds inside the din of her own mind, surrounded as it was by silence, or the anxiety of hoping to hold onto them. So she suspended them inside a complex web of electronics, from the steely purr of sine waves to the murmur of a no-input mixer. The two sidelong pieces are a slow-motion seesaw between low-volume hums and symphonic rapture, or, really, between the way the chaotic world actually exists and our attempts to order it.
Johnson’s work as Matchess has always lived behind one scrim or another, with thin layers of noise or distortion warping her shifty pop. Her songs seemed to echo down long, dark hallways or up spiral staircases, her voice always arriving from … over there, somewhere. Despite the process, though, Sonescent paradoxically steps through that scrim, perhaps even tearing it down. This is the clearest manifestation of Johnson’s musical mind yet, as she works to wrest sound from silence, music from meditation. You can hear her find an idea and try to hang onto it, to spot a melody she likes and not allow the exigencies of the world to obliviate it before she can share. Sonescent feels incredibly vulnerable, as if Johnson is allowing you a perch inside her head.
From that position, Sonescent’s two pieces unfurl like a desert landscape—subtle or even listless at first, but truly alive and rich given time. Silence slowly rises into a harmonic hum during “Almost Gone,” like an extended invocation of “om.” Johnson’s viola joins at a distance, eventually tugging the full band into a classical march that gives way, in turn, to a roaring drone. The strings sigh above dancing drums and, then, phantom bass notes; it is ghostly, as if you’re conjuring the sound of some long-dead military band on a centuries-old battlefield. “Through the Wall” works in the other direction, the stately string orchestrations that begin it gradually giving in to corrosive electronics that peel away the layers until only crumbs and fragments are left. Just on the edge of disappearing, though, the band returns to play what could have been the theme song from some silly ’70s sitcom through the noise. Brian Sulpuzio’s electric guitar lick slices into the mix, a knowing wink that provides a playful bit of reassurance just before static finally swallows the band.
Silent meditation, Johnson told me recently, provided a way to return to the present, to not dwell in nostalgia or fret too much about the future. “What’s happening in this moment is the entirety of existence,” Johnson said. Sonescent, in turn, recalls the potential complexity of every moment, the way that layers of meaning—and, in this case, music—sometimes hide in plain sight. Are those drums that canter in after three minutes of “Through the Wall,” or a trick of the ear? What is the line between sonority and dissonance eight minutes later, when curdled electronics and crystalline strings occupy the same space?
Sonescent slips between Reynols’ brilliant Blank Tapes, where you imagine musical shapes coming from re-recorded sleice, and Ned Lagin’s immersive Seastones series, where there’s so much music you have to tease out the hidden figures. I find myself listening a little closer during those above instants, paying more attention to the present than I was just a second before. That’s what Johnson sought in the Mojave; it is, generously, what she extends in return during Sonescent.
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