Whitney Johnson: Lines of Flight

The artist-composer on the Chicago experimental scene, her Matchess alter ego and the cult of Hermaphroditus

For the past 15 years, Whitney Johnson has been a prolific collaborator in Chicago’s experimental scene.

She’s built an academic career as a sociologist, all the while playing in bands as a violist and working with everyone from Circuit des Yeux to Lia Kohl.

Johnson has also been releasing solo music under her alter ego, Matchess. Her repertoire ranges from murky ambient pop songs to abstract sound art pieces, often shrouded in delay and reverb.

Now she debuts under her real name with Hav, an electroacoustic ‘healing composition’ for a selection of five very specific instruments. It’s released in tandem with Matchess’ new work Stena, a sound collage built on a foundation of processed field recordings.

Each record highlights different aspects of Johnson’ artistic personality, and while they do each stand for themselves, they’re better understood as two parts of a whole.

Whitney Johnson, photo: Marzena Abrahamik

“In my work, I’m trying to foster and nurture aesthetics based on affect and embodied perception, rather than systems of codification. I’m trying to open up definitions and turn those into questions, lines of flight.”

Do you have any musical memories of your childhood in Pennsylvania?

This was a small town community, remote and isolated from the rest of the country and the world. My parents’ generation talks about that time with a kind of purity; they just didn't hear about things. The styles were ten years behind New York City. The music there felt like it was trapped in time.

Growing up, I had three Swedish great aunts who were part of this Evangelical religious team that traveled around and played music on weird instruments. They played the handbells, glasses and spoons, but also sang as a trio. It was folk and religious music with a Swedish influence. They were really eccentric. I remember some of their concerts in church.

When you were six, you moved to another small town in Indiana. How was that compared to Pennsylvania?

Indiana is an agricultural state, pretty right-wing conservative, with the exceptions of places like Indianapolis and Bloomington. But for the most part, it's farming culture. Gary is industrial, and my dad worked there at a steel mill. The whole economy and culture was driven by the steel mills. It's also close enough to Chicago that some people drive to work in the city. So there would be a contingent of fancy city people, steel mill workers, and farmers – all in this small town. There were a lot of competing influences.

You started playing the viola at age nine. Why that instrument?

It's funny. I get along with other violas really well. There's a certain thing between us, especially people who started on viola as little kids. So I was lucky that we had rental instruments at school, and there was a string orchestra: Violin, viola, cello, bass… I knew all the other ones, but the viola was the question mark. And I was drawn to the unknown, the weird one. I think that's the same among violists. There's curiosity. It’s part of what made me who I am.

Did you listen to a lot of classical music, or popular music as well?

At home, I don't think there was much classical music. My parents were into what now would be considered classic rock. My mom sang in the church choir. She’d played the French horn when she was younger. I did love music class in school, and I played the keyboard briefly as a little kid. In high school I listened to a lot of classical music, and then I went to college for classical performance. That was the plan for a long time. So I wasn't drawn to much popular music.

Matchess

So you're on track for this classical performing career, and one day you realize, I don’t want to keep on performing these old pieces, I want to write pieces myself…

That was a huge part of it. For a long time, I’d been fine with interpreting these scores and playing this music other people had written a long time ago. I had my own taste, but the whole context was fine. That changed in college. Suddenly I got tired of interpreting these people's compositions. I wanted to make my own music. I wanted to be the composer. That was a big change, and it took a long time to get the confidence to actually do it and put something out there. It had to grow for ten years, until I was ready.

By that time, you’d started immersing yourself in the Chicago noise and improv scene. Can you describe that environment?

It was such a hodgepodge. I was drawn towards avant-garde composition and new music, and there was noise and punk, experimental music, and indie rock that had more experimental influences. It didn’t feel quite so categorized at that point, and there was a lot of collaboration. I was going to many shows and playing in groups. I wasn’t playing my own music yet, but I was playing viola parts for other bands. That's when that all started, basically when I left the classical music world.

That was after the heydays of the Chicago post-rock and indie scene of the 1990s, right? I’m thinking bands like Tortoise or Gastr Del Sol.

Yeah, those were the cool kids in school, like one generation ahead of me. They were really established at that point. They were touring the world and doing the real thing. We were these younger kids, trying to figure it out.

Jumping 15 or even 20 years ahead, you’ve released multiple albums under your Matchess alias and appeared and collaborated on many other projects. One of the two new albums, Hav, is the first time you release music under your birth name.

Yeah, it's splitting off from the Matchess project. At the start, it wasn’t a plan that they became two albums. That happened in the making. There were things that just didn't fit, and I wanted to make music with all of these materials, sonic elements and concepts. I just realized it wasn't one album, and then I explored, what are these two things? Who are these two artists making these, and how do they live side by side? I’d say Whitney Johnson as a person is more of a composer, while Matchess is more of a sound artist, or maybe a noise artist.

During the making of these two records, you held artist residencies in Malmö and at Stockholm’s famed Elektronmusikstudion (EMS). You mentioned that you have Swedish roots as well, didn’t you?

I have family in Sweden, some distant cousins who are roughly my age. I went to visit them in the early 2000s and stayed in touch. That's a really American thing, you know? A lot of people are going to other places to figure out who they are. Indigenous people know, but everyone else is like: Who are my people? Where do I come from? How did I get here, and why?

I went to Sweden during the recordings of these albums two or three times. The first time, I was living in a rural area in this converted barn by myself, where I did some recording and a bunch of writing. It was a strange time when I arrived, because it was the darkest time of the year. I got there in early January, right after the solstice and with jet lag. It was a very confusing and sleepless experience for me. I was taking these walks in the afternoon, and it was completely dark, so it felt very dreamy and surreal.

Can you talk about your compositional process, specifically on Hav?

Part of it was trying to limit my sonic palette. When I started the Matchess project, it was limited to organ, viola, one specific drum machine and voice. As far as sound sources, that was it. And it's changed and grown so much, there are tons of sources now, so I wanted to get back to that. That's why there are only five instruments on that whole album: Viola, sine waves, the Arp Odyssey synthesizer, the halldorophone and the marimba. That was a big new discovery. I was suddenly in love with the marimba, loving the sound of metal on wood. It’s magic to me.

The marimba always reminds me of classic American minimalism.

It's definitely a sound that's familiar from that era. But there's a Deuter recording. Do you know Deuter, the Krautrock musician?

Sure, the New Age guy?

Yeah, so he made this Kundalini Yoga recording. It shows up in odd places online, such as Osho’s shaking meditation. I'm actually not sure if it's marimba. It sounds maybe more like a dulcimer or something, but that was a real inspiration, especially how it starts with just a minimal eighth note on key percussion.

You mentioned the halldorophone. I’ve heard a couple of artists using it in recent years, like Hildur Guðnadóttir on the Joker soundtrack.

I was familiar with Stockholm’s EMS for a long time, and then someone told me about the halldorophone. I was curious about it because it looks like a cello, so it's kind of a string synthesizer. I had never played one before I arrived. It has four strings that are set up like a cello, and then eight resonant strings under that. And it has a feedback synthesizer, so you can change the levels of feedback between the two. If you want to play it like a cello, it's possible. Some cellists will find the sweet spot where it can be slightly synthesized with the resonant strings. I went the other direction – I just wanted to make it this resonant body, barely playing any notes with the bow or the fingers. It was more feeding back between the strings and doing different tunings, which worked well with the album being all in just intonation.

Just intonation is used a lot in experimental music these days, but without a solid background in music theory it’s hard to understand.

I was unaware of alternate tunings as well, until I worked with La Monte Young at the Dream House in New York in 2015. That opened this door to a different compositional approach that's about frequencies rather than notes or pitches. Honestly that blew my mind, because I had only been in the world of pitches. 12 tones was the most experimental you could get if you're working with that system. Then suddenly it was microtones. I knew about microtonal Indian music, but I didn't play it and hadn't messed around with that scale system. When I first heard just intonation, it felt like noise music. That was intriguing and drew me in.

What we've learned to understand as music from very early childhood is all equal temperament, which is not working with harmonics, it's actually working against them. We're confined in that box by our cultural training. So when you hear just intonation, it doesn't even sound like music at first. It sounds unsettling, but the more time you spend with it, the more it can feel calming, resonant and soothing. Once you're in, it feels more harmonically in line with the human body and the cosmos. I'm still growing into it, but it goes really well with slow compositional approaches.

It's really challenging with the viola though, because it's just a few hertz off in a lot of cases. It's just a little off where you're used to putting your fingers, and that's something you're trained so much to do, this precise place of the note.

Aside from La Monte Young, are there any other composers in that field that you feel inspired by?

Cat [Catherine] Lamb is someone who comes to mind. She’s a violist that does alternate tunings really well. Sarah Davachi has also become a friend, but is very inspirational. I love her music so much.

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One major inspiration for the new records was the ancient cult of Hermaphroditus. What fascinated you about it?

They celebrated the existence of an intersex or non-binary deity. They would even have cross-dressing at rituals and events, and it was a celebratory, joyous thing. But at some point, as it goes into Roman mythology, it suddenly turns into a cautionary tale, like: If you don't please the gods, you'll be cursed and punished by becoming this intersex being. By the time Ovid retells the tale, a cultural shift had happened.

I wanted to go to the roots, the celebratory time. So I followed that cult of worshipers to Cyprus and Greece, but couldn't find a ton of evidence. There were a few sites with an artifact, some inscription or a historical record. I spent time in those places, listened to the environment, did field recordings, took photos and VHS camcorder videos. I did as much reading and research as I could, but it was also a sensory ethnographic process where I was trying to absorb and perceive and feel more than do archeological digs or something.

I was reading Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein on that trip. It was the saddest book I've ever read, just profoundly touching and moving. But what has turned into a much bigger artistic motivation for me is this aspect of doubles, things that are like mirror images of one another, oppositions, shadows, doppelgangers, alter egos, split personalities – any of those things are drawing me in right now, even at the level of my own life and identity, the idea of the romantic couple and the partnership.

What are you currently reading?

Rachel Cusk has a new novel out, Parade. It’s totally blowing me away. It's about an artist who takes on lots of different manifestations. She's explicitly reckoning with gender throughout the piece, what it means to be a female artist. It’s so good.

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Media Diet

Listening: Evan Parker & Paul Lytton – Collective Calls (Urban) (Two Microphones) [1972/2023]

I worked from London this week, so naturally I spent an evening hanging out at Café Oto. At each of my visits I end up asking staff what they’re playing – shazaming mostly doesn’t work there – and discovering great records that way. You’d think there’s nothing less suitable as background music than hardcore free improv, but Oto is that rare environment where it totally works.

Collective Calls got re-released on the café’s in-house label Otoroku last year. A collaboration between two veterans of the brit-prov scene, saxophonist Evan Parker and percussionist Paul Lytton, this is radical free music not even remotely resembling jazz. Actually, it has more similarities with atonal noise, musique concrète or early electronic music. Both Parker and Lytton are employing regular and self-built instruments, and they’re playing back tape recordings of found sounds and previous sessions. So wild.

Reading: The Cure Special at The Quietus (2024)

For a long-time Cure fan like myself, this is just like heaven (sorry). Because of some marketing-stunt-induced rumours about a possible new album slated for Nov 1, the nice people at TQ compiled some archive stories: in-depth reviews of their best albums, like Faith, Pornography and Disintegration; a classic 1989 interview with Robert Smith in which he disses Morrissey and the Dire Straits; and a list of personal favorite b-sides, album tracks, live cuts and rarities from the catalogue, hand-picked by TQ writers.

Watching: Kata Kovács & Tom O’Doherty – Woven All of Dream and Error (2024)

Exhibited in a Berlin gallery last week, this is a hauntological collection of films and images captured during walks along defunct railway lines in and around the city, juxtaposed with machine-learning-generated train noise playing over portable speakers. I love that idea of having ML “hallucinate” trains and playing those results back over abandoned tracks.

The hypnotizing soundtrack, made out of processed trumpet, guitar and electronic sounds, also works as a standalone piece. I briefly talked to O’Doherty about their musical inspirations, and I remember him specifically mentioning Éliane Radigue, Alvin Lucier and the droney post-rock of Labradford. Below you’ll find the music video to the first track. There’s also a good explainer video on the exhibition website.