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sinceileftyoublog · 4 years

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Wobbly Interview: Going for Happy

BY JORDAN MAINZER

Thurston Moore Ensemble/Negativland band member Jon Leidecker has been releasing electronic music under the moniker Wobbly for over two decades now. In Chicago experimental label Hausu Mountain, he seems to have found kindred spirits, matching his far out idiosyncrasies. 2019′s Monitress and its follow-up, Popular Monitress, which came out earlier this month, are albums about and by machines, as Leidecker ran his music into pitch trackers and synth apps on his phones and tablets, embracing the errors and randomness that were produced along the way. While the source material on Monitress was mostly improvised, the songs on Popular Monitress are more structured and composed, resulting in songs like “Authenticated Krell”, which follows a comparatively clean synth arpeggio before being enveloped by texture, or “Lent Foot”, where the various instruments trail each other. It’s remarkable just how familiar certain sounds are even if not traditionally instrumental ones, like the typewriter clacks of “Illiac Ergodos 7!” or the zooming notes of the thumping title track. Blurring the lines between what’s instrument and what’s not, and even further, what’s composed music and what’s not, Popular Monitress is a defining statement for both Leidecker and Hausu.

I was able to ask Leidecker about various songs on the album and their inspirations. Read his answers below!

Since I Left You: You chose to write more structured songs this time around before running them through the pitch tracker. Do those nuggets of recognizable structures make the final product all the more disorienting?

Jon Leidecker: Hopefully! On both albums, the main thing is keeping the focus on just how live those pitch trackers are. It’s Monitress as long as you can hear how they’re listening. For years, it was strictly a piece for live performance--I needed to be improvising myself, and able to respond instantly, to really underline just how spontaneous the machine responses are. So the first record tried to keep more of that sense of flow. Large stretches of it are simply baked down from stereo recordings of concerts & radio performances of it. Overdubbing more layers of trackers seemed legal, as long all the voices were following that one original sound.

Of course, when you play a tune, something composed or even quantized, it definitely becomes easier to hear what they’re doing. The exact same code running on each phone will respond in very different ways to the same source audio, and you get a chorus of individual voices. They play a lot of wrong notes, but oddly, if you feed the trackers lots of consonant, major chords, it stops being dissonance, and you can tell they’re going for happy. You hear these weird things, trying to sing in unison, and..the result is just pure delight. Weirdly emotional! What’s a mistake? What’s music?

SILY: How did you come up with the song titles? For instance, is there anything particularly Appalachian about "Appalachian Gendy"?

JL: They’re mostly mashed up references to landmark works in the field of generative & algorithmic composition, from the 50’s up to the early 90’s. The recent push of stories on AI musical tools seems to be about automation and labor-saving, but the field of how to develop tools for more creative ends goes back all the way to Bebe and Louis Barron going to the Macy Conferences on Cybernetics and designing their first self-oscillating feedback circuit.

So while my tracks aren’t really in the musical style of the works they reference--something like “Appalachian Gendy”, which sprung up a fantasy Spiegel/Xenakis tribute, got paired to that stompdown track, and once it did, I added a solo on iGendyn.

SILY: To what extent is your music here inspired by the inner workings of the brain?

JL: Once you get a grip on just how simply neurons and synapses interact, how reassuringly physical thinking is, the electronic music I’ve always found most inspiring often involve feedback systems, self-playing devices, generative music, things that learn rather than settle. Music that helps you model thought. The whole East Coast/West Coast 60’s divide in synth design boiled down to Moog reducing your options until you could easily dial in what you already know you want, and Buchla designing uncertainty machines to be networked together until they approach the complexity of an unknown brain.

SILY: "Synaptic Padberg" and "Every Piano" have moments of recognizable instruments as opposed to alien instruments (strings and piano, respectively). Was that just a product of the errors/randomness of the music-making, or purposeful?

JL: It's supposed to sound orchestral, so I hit my Mellotron and Chamberlin apps pretty hard with this piece. Not like anything remains plausibly real once they're getting hammered by the trackers. That is a real grand piano, however: me playing the tune at SnowGhost Music in Montana. Brett Allen deserves an engineering credit, but I also wanted the first listen to make you wonder.

SILY: There's almost a funky rhythm to "Motown Electronium". Do you envision folks dancing to this record?

JL: Would have been plain wrong to put that title on an unworthy beat. What would a room full of people dancing to this even be like? Maybe in Baltimore.

SILY: Do you think "Training Lullaby" is what a computer trying to write a lullaby would sound like?

JL: Not that relaxing, is it? That’s ten seconds pulled from a five minute live improvisation, just a little burst of fury in the middle. Which I’ve heard enough now that I can sing along to it; so now, for me, it is calming.

I finally had to admit to myself that I’m a fan of the OpenAI Jukebox stuff. It’s right at that stage where their results are still primitive enough to remain a little mysterious. All the context and relationships intrinsic to what humans call music is irrelevant to those GANs. They don’t need culture to make music, they just need waveforms. What does it tell us that simple pattern analysis and brute number crunching on a large enough data set can produce those sounds? They’re training us. I have twelve hours of their Soundcloud dump ripped to my phone, and I play it a lot, though I wouldn’t play it for anyone under four. Can definitely sing along to some of the weirder ones by now.

SILY: How did you approach the order of tracks on the record? I'm struck by, for instance, the chaos of "Grossi Polyphony" following the comparative lull of "Every Piano".

JL: Just trying to show the range, and keep the surprises coming. Perpetual variety becomes monotony so quickly, so there is a very careful balancing act to play between shorter and longer tracks. I like a record where on first listen, any new section that begins, you feel like there are no guarantees how long it’ll last, eight seconds or eight minutes. Even things that sound like they should be songs: no guarantees. I still remember the first time I heard The Faust Tapes as a teenager.

SILY: Did you actually use musical dice to write "Wurfelspiel"?

JL: “Wurfelspiel” is just name-dropping Mozart’s generative piece--again, a real piano, but no musical dice involved.

SILY: The beats towards the end of the album--the pseudo hip-hop of "Cope By Design", techno of "Dusthorn Sawpipe", krautrock of "Help Desk"--seem to me to be far more propulsive than anything else here. Do you see a connection between those tracks?

JL: The album hits you with all these miniatures in the middle to keep things moving, and those three are the last little barrage of them before the shift into the final stretch with the longer, more hypnotic pieces. Can be tough to sequence an album when you’ve got so many short tracks, but it’s also total freedom.

SILY: How did you like getting the Hausu Mountain album art treatment?

JL: Totally family. All the Monitress packaging has always been iPhone panorama mode artifacts, visual glitches not entirely unlike what my phone’s trackers do to what they hear. I gave one of those images to [Hausu Mountain co-founder Max Allison] to work with the cover of the first Monitress, and he sent back this image, saying, “Here’s the initial stage: Your photo reduced to color blocks I’ll carefully render out later.” So when the second hyper-detailed one came back in a more proper Hausu style, they already seemed like a sequence, and this second one was already in place, so it all clicked. Any version of Monitress, the music is different, but it’s always the same piece. I’m really happy they asked me for something. [Label co-founder Doug Kaplan] and Max are just coming from the good place.

SILY: Are you doing any live streams or socially distant shows any time soon?

JL: Multi-location live streams are a blast. The time modulation inherent in all streaming is deeply psychedelic. The kind of listening you have to do when you know that the relationship of sounds together in time is different for each musician involved? I’m learning utterly new tricks, and it’s astonishing just how live the result is. I sat in on a live stream with Thurston Moore Group a few months ago, the four of them in London, and me hooked up to an amp not far from where I normally am when I play with them. And everyone agreed: It felt like I was there, right up until the instant I quit the app.

I’ve been pre-recording some home live sets for Hausu, Curious Music and High Zero Foundation. Negativland is putting together an hour long performance with Sue-C for the Ann Arbor Film Festival in late March. I finished an album mostly recorded outdoors with my old friend Cheryl E. Leonard for Gilgongo, and we’re going to try to a few outdoor concerts, too.

SILY: What else are you currently working on/what's next?

JL: The second album with Sagan, with Blevin Blectum & J Lesser, is coming out in late April. That one took 14 years to finish. There’s a trio record with Thomas Dimuzio and Anla Courtis coming out on Oscarson. Doing a revision of the last episode of my podcast on sampling music, Variations, to incorporate that OpenAI music. Some Negativland releases tying together the last two albums. There are about four of five other albums that might be done, though it takes time to be sure.

SILY: Anything you've been listening to, reading, or watching lately?

JL: This month has been Maryanne Amacher’s collected writings, Keeping Together in Time by William H. McNeill, Ministry For The Future by Kim Stanley Robinson, important even with happy ending. Interview with Karl Friston - Of Woodlice And Men. Listening to a lot of “Blue” Gene Tyranny, Xenakis & Lang Elliott, and last week every Ghédalia Tazartès album in reverse chronological order. I don’t care what anybody says: That guy’s immortal.

SILY: Anything I didn't ask about you want to say?

JL: Thank you for your questions!

Popular Monitress by Wobbly

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mllemaenad · 6 years

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'Imagine your children growing up in such a world. If a mage asked it of you, you would have to give him your daughter, not knowing what his plans for her might be. You could not resist him, and neither could she.' - Sorry, this line particularly came to my attention because take away magic and this? Is exactly what happens in the Tabris origin. And to that one Orlesian merchant in Denerim in DA:O. And probably to any number of peasant/elven girls at the hands of nobles every day across Thedas.

No need to be sorry. :)

You’re right. Absolutely.

The thing is – take this in context. This is an answer written by a grand cleric to a nobleman who seems (we don’t have his side of the conversation, obviously, so we can only infer from the substance of the reply) to have been challenging the Chantry’s treatment of mages. If you look at it like that, then what the grand cleric is describing is what happens to almost every mage child in southern Thedas.

Armed men come to your door and take your child away. You have no right to say no. And you have no idea what they’re going to do with them. They may take your child to a Circle across the sea. They may murder them. They may make them Tranquil. They may rape them, beat them, torture them. Maybe you’ll be lucky: maybe your kid is Vivienne or one of the Warden mages. Maybe they’ll do okay.

But you don’t know. And you can’t tell the Templars to go away; that they can’t have your child. They live in a world where this happens to parents every day.

It’s almost too much to imagine. The Circle, the Templars, they’ve shaped my life. I was no more than twelve when they came for me. My mother wept when they fixed the chains to my wrists, but my father was glad to see me gone. He had been afraid, ever since the fire in the barn. Not just afraid of what I could do, but afraid of me, afraid my magic was punishment for whatever petty sins he imagined the Maker sat in judgement upon.

– Anders (short story)

Anders’s mum couldn’t say no. Maybe she wanted to. At bare minimum, it sounds as though she didn’t want to lose her son forever. But that’s what happened. Little Ella is desperate to get back to her parents, because the Templars didn’t even tell them where they were taking her – and when we encounter her, a Templar is threatening her with Tranquillity and strongly implied sexual assault.

Wynne gave birth to a healthy baby boy, whom she was allowed one day with before he was taken into Chantry custody. The child, who was names Rhys, was taken to Lydes and from there transferred to the White Spire in Orlais when it was discovered that he, too, was a mage.

– World of Thedas I

They kidnapped a newborn baby and took him to a different damn country. It took decades, and fighting an archdemon, for Wynne to even get the chance to find him again.

Dulci de Launcet was lucky: she’s a noble, so she at least had letters and some general idea of where her kid was, but she hadn’t laid eyes on her son since he was six.

Yeah. Good fucking job, Chantry. You really solved the problem of powerful people coming to your door to abduct your children.

But while, yes, given the context of the letter I think the irony is best understood in relation to mages, I definitely think it can be expanded upon:

The demon had impersonated the human man who had bought her from the slavers that took her in after her father died. She’d had no idea back then who those kind men really were, only that they offered her food and a warm bed to sleep in. Then an even kinder man came to take her from them, and she found herself in his luxurious home and thought herself the luckiest girl in the entire alienage.

How very naive she had been. Count Dorian, as she learned her new master’s name to be, had been in search of an elven whore he could keep as a pet, something he could put in a pretty dress and bring with him on one of his many trips to the capital, like baggage.

– Dragon Age: The Calling

Ah, look. The exact scenario Grand Cleric Francesca was fear-mongering about. A little girl abducted, enslaved and sold to a nobleman who abused and tortured her. Yes, a mage-child as it happens, but that wasn’t apparent at the time. Fiona was vulnerable because she was an elf – an orphaned elf considered expendable by society.

“What they wish is irrelevant.” Celene turned and stalked away from the window. “I am already fighting a war on two fronts. I cannot be seen to fight a war on three.”

“Then don’t.” Briala rose, putting herself in Celene’s path. “Give them justice.”

“A lord for the death of an elf? I … damn this thing.”

With a quick jerk, Celene tore her mask from her face. Her face was flushed beneath, her eyes red from another night of little sleep. “Shall I declare the elves equal citizens before the Maker and the throne as well, while I’m at it?”

“Why not?” Briala took her own mask off, stealing a quick moment to steady herself. “Unless you don’t believe that, and I’m just a jumped-up kitchen slut you haven’t tired of yet.

– Dragon Age: The Masked Empire

Or here: a revolt that ends in genocide, and that begins because it is unthinkable that they arrest a nobleman for murdering an elf. The victim’s name was Lemet. He was killed shielding an eight-year-old boy who threw a rock at a carriage. And the boy said he did it because his mother had been murdered by Orlesian nobility:

“They killed my mother,” the boy said, pulling against Lemet’s grip.

“Be quiet.” Lemet looked back at the coach and heard its joints creak as the guards jumped down to the street. The driver would want to have that oiled, some part of Lemet’s mind noted.

“They can’t come down this street after what they did to her,” the boy insisted. “They can’t!”

– Dragon Age: The Masked Empire

Or this, where soldiers rob, rape and murder their own citizens in the midst of a civil war:

“Two days ago, Lady Seryl’s men rode in and cur down every man and woman working the fields. Killed our guards, killed everyone in the village square. When they finished killing the other soldiers, they fired arrows out onto the water, killed most of our boys in the boats. They took all the food they could find. They spent the night.” A collective flinch splashed across the crowd. “Said we had been assisting enemies of the throne, that this was a lesson to anyone who’d help Gaspard’s men.” At the last, his voice broke. “My lord, I don’t even know who Gaspard is.”

– Dragon Age: The Masked Empire

Or the serial killer who is repeatedly allowed to walk free because he’s a magistrate’s son, and he targets elven children. Or the elven boys who fled to the Qun because a guard raped their sister – no one would arrest him, so they took matters into their own hands.

And yes, of course, you see the exact same thing in Ferelden in the alienage.

I’m sure everyone feels so much safer now they’ve locked up all the mages.

Orlais’s crimes don’t excuse Tevinter’s. That’s where they went wrong with Dorian’s … painful dialogue on slavery. You can’t point to the horrors of Orlesian society and therefore suggest that the Tevinter slave trade is not that awful. It doesn’t work like that. What you can do, though, is say that Tevinter’s crimes don’t excuse Orlais’s – particularly when they tend to do exactly the same shit:

Slavery still thrives in Thedas, even if the trade has been outlawed. Who hasn’t heard the tales of poverty-stricken elves lured into ships by the prospect of well-paying jobs in Antiva, only to find themselves clapped in leg-irons once at sea? And humans fall prey to this, too.

If they’re lucky, they end up in Orlais, which has only “servants.” Most nobles treat them decently because they are afraid of admitting the truth. Orlesians go to great lengths to maintain the fiction that slavery is illegal.

Of course, the greatest consumer of slave labor is the Tevinter Imperium, which would surely crumble if not for the endless supply of slaves from all over the continent. There, they are meat, chattel. They are beaten, used as fodder in the endless war against the Qunari, and even serve as components in dark magic rituals.

—From Black City, Black Divine: A Study of the Tevinter Imperium, by Sister Petrine, Chantry scholar

– Slavery in the Tevinter Imperium

Fiona is not an anomaly: Orlais kidnaps and sells people into slavery, too.

And this makes sense. Fantasy always draws on the real world, even if they mix and match the cultures and historical periods a bit. So, just like in the real world, you generally have to take anything the wealthy and powerful say with a grain of salt.

The Chantry has a very specific, empire building, agenda. It makes much of problems that aren’t really problems (demons and abominations are not widespread threats, and both are poorly understood); it pins the blame for actual crises on oppressed groups (the Blight is in no way the fault of this random peasant mage from Antiva); it uses racism and religious intolerance to create in- and out-groups (elves [and dwarves, but we haven’t conquered them yet] are degenerate heathens who are preventing the Maker from returning).

As much as I love Dragon Age, what Bioware does sometimes that is … uncomfortable … to use a mild word, is that it lets the powerful rule the narrative. Inquisition is worst at this, because it presents strong voices for people like Cassandra and Cullen, who stick fairly close to the party line. And then it takes characters like Varric and Sera, and distances them from their own cultures … which is fine for individuals but awkward when we’re not letting Briala or Fiona say much either – and where the fuck is Sigrun? No one’s spoken for Orzammar’s casteless since Awakening. But it’s there, to some extent, in all the games.

So the point, always, is that mages and Circles are misdirection. Mages are scapegoats in the Chantry faith who are held responsible for all the bad things, and represent a pretend evil nobility that the Orlesian Chantry is keeping under control.

But the actual problems of this fantasy world are more or less the same as the problems of the real world: powerful nations dominate the continent and force others to bow to their whims and adopt their culture, because empires are just shit; the rich and powerful hoard all the rights to themselves, and can do damn near anything to the poor – particularly where the poor are part of a marginalised group.

What Orlais doesn’t want people to realise is that they are Tevinter. It was never the mages that were the problem, it was the absolute power the Tevinter magisters held over their slaves – a power now held mostly by the Orlesian nobility, who use it in pretty much the same way. Not exclusively, no: of course the nobility of other nations can be, and bloody are, evil fucks. But even there, the Chantry view helps to obscure the truth: you should be scared of empires and those who rule them. Much more scared than you are of a possessed mage.

#dragon age #Anonymous #cw: violence #cw: abuse #cw: rape #chantry critical

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