Matchess Sonescent Vinyl LP 2022

1. Almost Gone
2. Through The Wall

Matchess take a giant step from psychedelic songcraft into pure psychoacoustic space, in which songs float with all the other sounds we hear in our body. The music of meditation; a sounds and thoughts of sounds and the natural beating of our
ears as they strain to hear more.

‘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.

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.

This experience recalled the feeling that Whitney had after her time working as an installation assistant at La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela’s Dream House in 2016. During that period, they hung Jung Hee Choi’s Ahata Anahata, Manifest
Unmanifest X. The process and aesthetic she witnessed there took up residence in her, changing everything in the process. The Vipassana meditation experience felt like another such passage, destined to resonate long and deep.

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.