Matchess

Matchess

Stena

Drag City

***Following Sonescent, Matchess’ 2022 album documenting “the final moments in the life of music,” Stena goes further, reanimating dying waves with a collage of found sounds, frequency experiments and new music compositions. Poring over notebooks rife with polarities and doppelgangers, considerations of biological and symbolic ancestry and the spirits that infuse places we leave behind, Matchess crafts an encompassing work of psychoacoustic music.

Matchess

Sonescent

Drag City

***Sonescent, the new album from Matchess, came to Whitney Johnson’s mind while she was at the Dhamma Vaddhana Meditation Center just north of Joshua Tree, during a course of Vipassana meditation. This is a ten day period that requires, among other codes of discipline, the practice of Noble Silence: silence of body, speech, and mind. As this practice settled in and around her, Whitney heard the things not always focused upon: first, tinnitus... then, breath- ing... the heartbeat, and another pulsing (something unknown, but familiar). So she listened to the sound of her body. After a time, her mind became involved, and she began to hear songs. But as she was keeping to her vows, she wasn’t able to write them down or sing them and record them. It was only after she’d returned from the desert that she wrote down what she’d heard, to the best of her ability. She decided to score the songs from the desert for other musicians to play, which was a departure from previous Matchess recordings, where she played and sang the music all herself. This process took a long while; first the scoring, drawing the pieces back out from herself based purely on memory. Then getting everyone together to play the music. Once she had them all finally fully captured, it seemed right to place the sounds back where they’d come from—a silent space, upon which the songs sometimes only barely intrude, as if heard from a great distance.

Matchess

The Rafter

Monofonus Press

***The Rafter is the third LP from Chicago artist MATCHESS. We are extremely excited to put this one out to follow the previous two beautiful records on one of our favorite labels (Trouble In Mind). We always ask our bands to make note of anything great they see while on tour and a couple years ago Marriage mentioned Matchess. We all immediately fell in love. It's an album that haunts us to bliss. Synthy, electronic strings, choir ghost vocals, and the pulse of the wind sort of explain what this sounds like.