{"id":5966,"date":"2020-12-15T21:50:10","date_gmt":"2020-12-15T21:50:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/hausumountain.com\/?page_id=5966"},"modified":"2020-12-15T21:50:10","modified_gmt":"2020-12-15T21:50:10","slug":"wobbly-popular-monitress","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/hausumountain.com\/?page_id=5966","title":{"rendered":"Wobbly – Popular Monitress"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"
\nTo be released on CD and cassette (C55) on 02\/05\/21. Artwork by HausMo Max. This is the catalog page with album information and artwork. To view the store page, click here<\/a>.<\/strong><\/h5>\n

<\/h1>\n

San Francisco-based multimedia artist, composer, and improviser Jon Leidecker<\/strong> makes music under the pseudonym\u00a0Wobbly<\/strong>. He is an active member of both the seminal experimental group\u00a0Negativland<\/strong>, and with the\u00a0Thurston Moore Ensemble<\/strong>. Over the course of a varied musical practice that began in the mid-1980s, Wobbly<\/strong> has collaborated with artists including Matmos<\/strong>, Dieter Moebius<\/strong> (Cluster<\/strong>), Tania Chen<\/strong>, Fred Frith<\/strong>, Tim Story<\/strong>, David Toop<\/strong>, Zeena Parkins<\/strong>, and People Like Us<\/strong>. Leidecker has released recordings on labels like Illegal Art<\/strong>, Important Records<\/strong>, Bureau B<\/strong>, and Tigerbeat6<\/strong>. After contributing extensively to Negativland<\/strong>\u2019s live-mix radio program\u00a0Over The Edge<\/strong><\/em>, spearheaded by the late Don Joyce<\/strong> and broadcast from Berkeley\u2019s KPFA FM<\/strong>, Leidecker inherited the program in 2015.<\/p>\n

Popular Monitress<\/strong><\/em>,\u00a0Wobbly<\/strong>\u2019s second release with Hausu Mountain, builds on the machine-randomized compositional processes that Leidecker workshopped on 2019\u2019s\u00a0Monitress<\/strong><\/em>\u00a0(HAUSMO96).\u00a0After delving deeper into his arsenal of iPads and iPhones stocked with synth software and MIDI-processing apps, he emerges with a nearly hour-long program of new material. The album explodes with overlapping alien melodies, swathes of granular texture, and frenetic electronic percussion patterns, all of which stack into dense barrages of digital detritus and twist through rapidly evolving song structures without ever compromising the gleeful spark and the chaotic sense of humor that run through all of Leidecker\u2019s work. Despite the overlap in nomenclature,\u00a0Popular Monitress<\/strong><\/em>\u00a0is not a remix album or a direct continuation of previous material – though the presence of the word \u201cpopular\u201d here might hint to listeners that he has adapted his approach to somewhat more legible, however skewed, semblances of songcraft. Wobbly<\/strong> once again positions himself as one godfather of many musical forms that have shaped Hausu Mountain into what it is today: fragmented glitch (de)composition; ballistic rhythmic workouts that float in a dimension parallel to the dance floor; ideas that challenge listeners with fluidly unfolding structures overflowing with thrilling deviations.<\/p>\n

Leidecker lays out\u00a0Popular Monitress<\/strong><\/em>\u00a0as a song cycle comprised of mostly shorter pieces, typically between 20 seconds and 3 minutes in length, that each offer a compact shock to the system with their discrete mosaics of fractured tones and splintered grids. When he extends his pieces past the five minute mark, Wobbly<\/strong> still refuses to sit still, and though certain melodic figures might function as recurring motifs within the madness, his non-recursive song structures flip from idea to idea at a whiplash pace. Some moments of\u00a0Popular Monitress<\/strong><\/em>\u00a0land as jittering, carnival-core beat sketches animated by bursts of synthetic brass, orchestral strings, and mutated \u201crock\u201d instrumentation (including a guitar performance by Negativland<\/strong> spearhead Mark Hosler<\/strong> on the riotous “Lent Foot”). In the instances when Wobbly<\/strong> pulls back the curtain and allows the voice of an unadorned piano to enter the mix, we catch a glimpse of almost classical grandeur before he allows the machines to subsume the real world back into their anarcho-electronic stew – or, in the case of the track “Every Piano,” a bed of rhythms programmed by Matmos<\/strong> co-chief Drew Daniel<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Leidecker<\/strong> himself explains the compositional framework that informs\u00a0Popular Monitress<\/strong><\/em>: \u201cThis is an album about machine listening. Once again my mobile phones and tablets are running pitch trackers and synth apps, converting the sounds they hear into error-prone melodies. The trackers are solely reflexive \u2014 they can\u2019t learn, or remember \u2014 but they output sounds of unarbitrary complexity, or \u2014 music. [\u2026]\u00a0If the last album focused more on improvisations and abstraction, this time around I prepared more in the way of \u2018tunes\u2019 ahead of time before turning them over to the trackers.\u201d Wobbly\u2019s seeds of melodic and structural ideas come out the other side of his machines in disfigured forms that draw power from random chance, and exploit technology to chaotic and entangled ends. Though the particulars of his process can certainly fly over our heads, Leidecker charges his work with a sense of playfulness and joy that can\u2019t help but entertain and fascinate those who tune in.<\/p>\n

\n\"\" \"\"\"\"<\/h1>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

To be released on CD and cassette (C55) on 02\/05\/21. Artwork by HausMo Max. This is the catalog page with album information and artwork. To view the store page, click here. San Francisco-based multimedia artist, composer, and improviser Jon Leidecker … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":678,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-5966","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hausumountain.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/5966","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hausumountain.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hausumountain.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hausumountain.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hausumountain.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5966"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/hausumountain.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/5966\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5971,"href":"https:\/\/hausumountain.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/5966\/revisions\/5971"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hausumountain.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/678"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hausumountain.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5966"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}