Monitress

Wobbly (Jon Leidecker) composed Monitress using several mobile devices running pitch-tracking apps which convert signals into MIDI data and activate synthesizers. Theres something strangely human about the way the devices interact with each other to create music, mistakes and all. Wobbly typically performs improvised concerts using three to six of these devices at a time; on Monitress, he recorded some keyboard improvisations and then fed them through the system of devices. In either case, hes only making one performance and the machines are doing the rest of the work. The album is a soup of amorphous textures which play off of each other in confounding ways. At times it ends up lapsing into jumbled rhythms too perversely complex for any human to have dreamt them up. Other moments are serene waves of scrambled signals which end up being oddly soothing. Leidecker has officially been a member of Negativland since 2011, and his fluid, generative textures have greatly shaped the groups sound: Listen to True False or any 2010s-era Over the Edge broadcasts and its plainly obvious which sounds are being generated by his devices. Still, they take on a life of their own on Monitress, an album which feels like its own lawless world of living, breathing circuits. ~ Paul Simpson