Monitress

San Francisco-based multimedia artist, composer, and improviser Jon Leidecker makes music under the pseudonym Wobbly. He currently records and tours with seminal experimental group Negativland, and with the Thurston Moore Ensemble. Over the course of a varied musical practice that began in the mid-1980s, Wobbly has collaborated with artists including Matmos, Dieter Moebius (Cluster), Tania Chen, Fred Frith, Tim Story, Thomas Dimuzio, David Toop, Zeena Parkins, and People Like Us. Leidecker has released recordings on labels like Illegal Art, Important Records, Bureau B, and Tigerbeat6. His podcast Variations, which explores the history of sampling and collage music, was originally commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona in 2009 before evolving into a lecture series at Mills, Stanford, Oxford, and Peabody Conservatory. After contributing extensively to Negativland’s live-mix radio program Over The Edge, spearheaded by the late Don Joyce and broadcast from Berkeley’s KPFA FM, Leidecker inherited the program in 2015.

Monitress is Leidecker’s first release with Hausu Mountain. Outside of his wide slate of collaborations and a number of self-published digital releases, the long-gestating album represents the first physical release of a Wobbly solo work since 2002. To create the takes that populate the album, Leidecker developed a process that exploits an arsenal of software on devices like iPads and iPhones. Mobile applications generate MIDI information from the external audio that Wobbly feeds into them, and then he retranslates and synthesizes that data into mutated semblances of songs. Given a chunk of audio as source material, these devices join together to produce densely stacked unison melodies, or spiral out of control when presented with complex polyphonies. In practice, Monitress explodes into every direction at once. Wobbly’s pieces highlight hyper-detailed rhythmic grids built over spastic, bludgeoning drum tones, unpredictable chromatic lead lines, and swathes of cybernetic noise texture. .