Whitney Johnson (Interview)
Good morning.
Today we’re listening to Whitney Johnson, an American musician based in Chicago. Born in Pennsylvania and raised there and Indiana, she picked up viola at age 9 and began composing original pieces in college (credit to for his interview). Johnson released two LPs on September 27, one under her own name and another under the moniker Matchess. Hav, her first record put out under her own name, opens with Max/MSP-designed sine waves (as she describes below) and then oscillates between minimalist loops and droning notes. Stena, her sixth LP as Matchess, is more sonically experimental, incorporating noise and field recordings and continually subverting expectations. A conversation with Johnson follows the streaming links.
Hav - Whitney Johnson (40m, no vocals)
Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube Music / Amazon Music / Bandcamp / Tidal
Stena - Matchess (40m, occasional light vocals in the background)
Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube Music / Amazon Music / Bandcamp / Tidal
What's your earliest memory of music?
From birth to age six, I lived in rural Pennsylvania next to a strip mine. There was a clearing in the woods behind our house, and I found these little plants with seeds that you could turn into soup. I made up songs back there.
How'd you get into playing and composing?
My first instrument was a duophonic Yamaha keyboard. I took some piano lessons but had to give them up when my skills went beyond two notes at a time. It wasn't until the school orchestra began in 4th grade that I started to play the viola.
The frequencies across Hav are entrancing, even intoxicating. Tell us how you generated those sounds.
These sine wave compositions were all made in Max/MSP. I have some rudimentary patches that look like lotus flowers when lots of oscillators are combined. They are quite tedious to modify, and I've been told they have bad gain staging. The fundamental frequencies of each piece are based in esoteric arithmetic. Throughout history people have claimed that certain frequencies have transcendent properties. I can't really speak to that. With these fundamentals in place, I use just intonation ratios to build the compositions. This record was my first using time-based coding. I wrote ridiculous strings of text to make frequencies move in precise ways.
How do you think about your Matchess music versus the music you release under your own name?
Matchess has been a project since around 2009. The compositional principles are quite different from those used to make Hav. As Matchess, I make irrational decisions based on pure intuition. I write lyrics and sing them in parallel fifths. If at first something sounds unsatisfying, I leave it alone and see if it satisfies me with time. Matchess is a quite rebellious project. I do things because I think they will piss people off, such as being too sad, too ugly, or too pretty. If I think someone would say, "Oh stop, that's too sad" I will probably do it even more. The same goes for doing something too pretty that would piss off noise people. I'll make something as soft and pretty as possible just to piss off the harsh guys. The same applies to engineering/production and conceptual relationships with the scientific method.
Tell us about the sound recordings heard across Stena.
These recordings came from a research/documentation trip to Cyprus and Greece. I was going everywhere I could find evidence of the cult of Hermaphroditus. They celebrated and worshiped this intersex deity with delight, humor, festivity, and identification. By the time the myth of Hermaphroditus found its way to the Roman Empire, it had become a cautionary tale (i.e. Hermaphroditus was cursed with this body as a punishment). I didn't want to think about that, not at all, so I went to the celebratory roots as best I could. Very little evidence remains, so I spent most of my time recording rocks, both sacred and profane. Their sounds are very quiet, as you might guess.
What music are you listening to the most right now?
Laetitia Sonami is taking part in Éliane Radigue's Occam Ocean with "A Song for Two Mothers." "Dancing with a Shadow" by Mass Text on a jogging mixtape. Zach Rowden's "Limit Experience" on the turntable while cooking breakfast. TV Buddha while driving my friends to the cinema. AOTY Lula Asplund's unreleased "Dreamlapse Tides or Silver Gilded Hand Mirror."
Name an underrated artist from the past 50 years.
Vin Diesel
What are you working on next?
Planning field recordings at the steel mills where my dad worked and where my brother currently works! Thinking of sounds as "dreams of escape." I'm coming back to the Ace Tone organ after some months away. Collabs: Winged Wheel, Cancer House, Who is the Witness?, string improv with Lia Kohl and
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