#HAV

[certified--hater]

Introduction

Hello, hello! Hamnah Arabella Valencourt here! Upon whom has the misfortune of my presence befallen today?

I dont know if you know me, but I doubt you've landed here by coincidence. But since you're here, let me introduce you to my family.

He's like a firefly, brightening up even the darkest of my days. He tries, and I'm grateful he does. His words are like paint, his tongue a brush, and every morning I am a canvas he breathes life into. My fiancé: @grayson-hawthorne1

My Nan. I call her Nana. She pretends she hates me, but we all know deep in her dark heart, I'm the favourite: @jackstruelove

My mother. The sweetest, and sometimes scariest, woman on the planet. Would definitely drink your blood: @imsaraht

My younger sister, the middle kid. Has the energy for it too. Is pregnant, and always wants chips. At least she's always on board for tomfoolery: @stuckinthevilla

My youngest sister. Definitely the favourite. Has cannibalistic tendencies, but I'm willing to overlook those. She's adorable: @shimmermetimbers

My aunt. Does voodoo, I think. I find her very cool. She's also almost always out for blood. I support that: @f4iry-bell

My cousin. Only one older than me. Won't be the eldest for longer..... Also a traitor: @elysianwayy77

My other cousin, a little too obsessed with cowboys to the point it's getting concerning. I hope you find one: @cowboy-obsessed

Shes my cousin. I like her, despite how sinister she can be sometimes. I like her vibes: @lila-77

My aunt who I'm not so close with, and I barely see her. I hope she's not dust and ashes......: @apollosmusee

Also my cousin. I don't know her well, but I hope I get to know her more: @blueliketheriver

Nan's sister, she's ambitious. I like her: @whatsamongus

My distant cousin, a sweetheart who deserves every sweet thing in the world. She's amazing and kind. Kind of like how everyone else in this house should be. The sanest, I think: @never-enough-novels

Avia's sister, somehow two timing two people. Jude's wife, I think. I can respect that: @astraeajackson

My aunt. She's cool and loves conan. And has a weird thing for carts: @freaknoia

My... Step-mother and ex grandmother. She needs therapy: @nonerrata-myarchives

My father. I hope at some point in our lives I can be closer to him: @pieceofherheart

My half brother, he thinks he can be intimidating by using big words. I would put him in a frilly tutu. Pink, of course. I still can't pronounce his name: @bosthenius-devil-boy

My aunt. I don't know her well, but she's pretty badass: @roonwarner

The family men:

@graysonlaysonhawthorne you are on thin ice and live for long, you insignificant pissant, you useless dupe.

@king-cardan a moody furry alcoholic. You'd get along with Mira.

@k-e-n-j-i-11 I used to like you but now I have mixed feelings. I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt.

@roonsaaronwarner didn't you promise to take us shopping? You're a disappointment.

@eunspercy haven't officially met you yet. I look forward to it.

@bad-boy-supremo Aren't you a little too young for her?

@castorvalor your biggest mistake is thinking I'm normal

@sheffield-grayson sleep with five eyes open

If I forgot you, no I didn't. 🤭

Farewell, whoever you are. If you ever land here again, land with purpose.

Actual acc: @lanterns-and-daydreams

[ist-das-kunst-oder-kann-das-weg]

[ljussangen]

[lareveusenoire]

So viele Texte geschrieben und nicht veröffentlicht

So viele Briefe geschrieben und alle zerrissen

Du fehlst mir nach wie vor unendlich und ich warte und hoffe noch immer

Auch wenn es dir wohl ohne mich blendend geht

Vielleicht hast du unser "Uns" auch schon vergessen

Wobei verdrängen glaube ich besser passen würde

Warst du wirklich so kalt und berechnend und hast mir über Monate etwas vorgespielt?

Kann es wirklich sein das ich mich so in dir,meinem Hav- meiner Liebe - so getäuscht habe?

Vielleicht liegt es an Deinen Depressionen die zu dieser Handlung geführt haben

Vielleicht liegt es an Deinen Ängsten

Vielleicht von vielem ein bisschen

Ich kann es mir nicht vorstellen das du so ein Mensch bist wie es auszusehen scheint

Eher schaffst du es dir selbst etwas vorzuspielen,oder einzureden bis du selbst dran glaubst/glauben magst

Weil es dann einfacher für dich ist

Ich habe mich in dich deine sanfte,auch ängstliche Seele verliebt

In dein liebevolles Herz

In dein verletzliches Du,was du kaum jemandem zeigst

Einfach in Dich

und meine Liebe zu dir wuchs mit jedem Stein der uns zum stolpern brachte noch mehr

weil ich daran glaubte -und immer noch glaube-das unsere Liebe es schaffen wird jeden Stein,jeden Felsen,jeden Orkan zu überwinden

Weil wir Seelenmenschen uns gegenseitig auffangen können,uns gegenseitig Halt geben können uns gegenseitig retten können

Auch wenn es aussichtslos erscheint

Werde ich weiter auf dich mein Herz,mein Kätzchen warten das du zurück zu mir - in dein Zuhause in meinen Armen - kommst

So lange mein Herz schlägt und ich atme gebe ich die Hoffnung nicht auf

Ich werde dich immer lieben mein hav

[femb0td111ary]

Jeg vil også findes, kom og fød mig, du kender mig! De andre børn er forlængst blevet født og fundet og gået hjem med deres mødre. Det er ikke sjovt længere, jeg vil findes! Skolegåelrden er tom.

Alle ud af dåsen

[dustedmagazine]

Whitney Johnson — Hav/Matchess — Stena (Drag City)

Matchess uses the moniker Whitney Johnson for the release Hav. It is an ambient album length work that seeks both to represent and heal the human body. Whitney uses both acoustic and synthetic means to express the wounds that accrue during the lifespan, as well as the warmth of repair. Arp Odyssey is the go-to for many who create ambient music, and it provides the harmonic underpinning of Hav. The purity of sine waves juxtaposes against the Arp’s rich tones, affording the electronics varied timbres, which are featured in the opener “Agora.” Whitney also plays the halidorophone, an electric cello, its bowed notes providing non-legato elements. The acoustic component consists of marimba and viola, supplying still more textural contrast.

The second movement “Dafni” uses the marimba to oscillate the same pitches that are being held on the Arp, an animated drone that is considerably beautiful. “Vari,” perhaps for variant, has polyrhythmic ostinatos in the marimba, with different held notes in the halidorophone and synth. “Kouklia” finds viola added to the proceedings, with octave repetitions set against bleeps and a number of descending sine waves.

“Amathounta” turns us back to the rich textures of “Agora,” this time with ascending glissandos. The marimba joins with the ostinato found in “Vari.” This movement in particular underscores the organic growth over the course of Hav’s music. The closer, “Kition,” accumulates still more material, overtone arpeggios prominent among them, into an ebullient coda. Hav’s celebration of the human in all its stages and its exhortation of repair are abstract concepts to conceive in music, but Whitney’s reuse of its component parts makes the topics palpable.

As Matchess, the artist uses a different collection of materials on the cassette Stena. While synths and sine tones are again prominent, found sounds make their way into the frame too. “Biskopskulla Högstena” begins the tape with long held drones. This segues into “The Dew of Sickly Sentiment,” in which the lower register is plumbed in a resonant octave. “In the Bed of Ivy” recycles descending sine waves, accompanied by a fetching chord progression played on synths. “Klara Kyrka” inserts found segments including distant helicopters and church bells. “Death in Trafo, or, the Crater” silences the bells with an abrupt, buzzy tone which is then morphed with pitch bends and multiplied in octaves, followed by pulsations and a repeating, short major key melody. At nine minutes in duration, it is the longest piece on Stena, and Matchess allows the various components to fade in and out, interrelating in various contexts. It is an expertly devised composition.

“Existe” and “DB” follow, miniatures with blowing wind, amplified guitar, and the aphoristic tune that has crept into previous movements. In “DB” the tune is taken down an octave and distorted almost beyond recognition, only to be followed by the whirring of helicopter blades. “In Sleep” starts out brusquely and then softens into a gentler demeanor in which wordless vocals can be heard against drones and wind. “Third Coin” contrasts the singing with strings, overlaps of the ubiquitous tune, and the whoosh of cabin pressure, ending with a buzz. “DNA Repair” concludes Stena with free-falling sine waves diving into the drone padding, followed by an extended passage of two-mallet marimba playing. Shards of buzzing interrupt occasionally, and the vibrato of the drones changes in speed. “DNA Repair” is gradually deconstructed, ending the recording with a single tone remaining held.

Hav and Stena are compelling documents, with Whitney Johnson/Matchess demonstrating a composerly approach to ambient music that is quite successful.

Christian Carey

[ferdinandtjuren]

Hittar mig själv på tomma bänkar runt Öresund.

[two-days-a-little-high]

They made a new hell of your own making it's called choices

[hahahmitski]

Abe, V and H (HAV)

Jacob was a bit hesitant, but looked more into Abe's bunker a bit more. Jacob then found a book, but it was filled with pictures and stories of V, H and himself. Even though they were hunting hollows and saving peculiars didn't mean they always had to always be so serious when doing stuff together. Some pictures were them holding hollow heads by their hands, maybe with a smile painted by their blood and so many more pictures of them being goofy. He showed the pictures to fugh, Noor and Emma so they could re-create those pictures. I swear HAV must of had a bunch of funny moments together.

P.S. Miss P knows about this and she was a bit hesitant, but allowed Jacob to continue searching most of his stuff to make sure they didn't have any more secrets that they had to solve.

[crowns-of-violets-and-roses]

Hav

In 1985 travel writer Jan Morris released her newest book chronicling the months she lived on the small and little known island nation of Hav.

Except that's not quite true. Morris is a travel writer, she wrote history and a memoir as well but travel was her main subject, and she did release Last Letters from Hav in 1985 but rather than being travel literature it is entirely fictional.

There isn't much in the way of a plot. For most of the books it simply relates different episodes from the time Morris spent in Hav.

The conceit that a work of fiction is a real text in universe is one I adore when executed well and Morris's execution is as near to perfect as I have seen.

Morris's extensive experience with travel writing lends Hav an extraordinary verisimilitude. With the exception of one scene late in the book it's all something that's easy to imagine reading in a real travel book.

Which isn't to say everything related is plausible to reality but when it departs from reality it's with embellishments or getting taken in by tall tales told by locals that you'd expect a real travel writer to relate.

Morris claims that many readers thought that Hav was a real place. While I'm generally skeptical of such claims, we've all heard the myths surrounding The War of the Worlds radio broadcast, I can almost believe it here.

Morris paints Hav so vividly that it almost feels that you can touch it. That you could close your eyes and see the city. Travel to the island and wander it's streets.

Hav is a book that's comfortable with ambiguity. I've grown tired of SFF that feels the need to always show the reader the truth with no room for uncertainty. Morris is more than happy to leave questions go unanswered. In one instance we get several different people's interpretation of an episode of Hav's history during World War 2 and absolutely none of them sound like they know what actually happened.

Morris is comfortable with not giving a answer and leaving the reader draw their own conclusions. Being willing to do that is central to why Hav feels real and many authors would benefit from learning from it.

The author and her surrogate character are well to do British women and there are chapters where that's very evident as there are parts where she exotifies the people of Hav. Given the nature of the book it can be hard to tell where the author ends and the narrator begins. It's genuinely not obvious to me whether this is just how Morris wrote about people in her travel writing or it was a deliberate decision made for her fiction.

If you decide to read it you should look for the new edition released in 2006 titled simply Hav. If it has an introduction by Ursula K Le Guin you have the right version.

This edition includes a short sequel Hav of the Myrmidons that was written by Morris thirty years after the original and is about her fictional alter ego returning to Hav thirty years after her original visit. It's not as good as the original but still a worthwhile read.

The book taken in it's entirety was of my favourite books I read last year. Morris masterfully evokes the country she has created, filling in a hundred details while hinting at even more. A life time as a travel writer made Morris able to make Hav feel real in a way few others could have.

[redoplus]

attaboy

[abarroteraflores]

Aqua deus ❤️💙

[lareveusenoire]

Nun sind es 3 Wochen, 22 Tage,534 Stunden her als du mich das letzte mal geküsst hast

Ich dich das letzte mal gesehen,gerochen,gespürt habe

Es wird nicht besser oder einfacher je länger du weg bist

Die Sehnsucht nach dir und das Vermissen werden von Tag zu Tag schlimmer

Du fehlst mir so

Unser Reden,unser Schweigen,unser Blödsinn machen,unser spielen

Einfach alles

Einfach du

Ich funktioniere seit du weg bist nur

Spiele meine "Rolle" vor den anderen

Und warte auf die Momente wo ich alleine bin und mich dem Schmerz hingeben kann,egal auf welche Art

Mein Herz tut weh,weil du mein hav fehlst

Mein Körper schmerzt

Ich bekomme fast keinen Bissen runter,

Kann kaum schlafen,aus Angst einen deiner Besuche zu verpassen -sogar die Hunde spüren es mittlerweile wenn du kommst -und danach liege ich weinend im Bett

Es tut so weh von dir getrennt zu sein und ich warte und hoffe immer noch das du nach Hause in meine Arme kommst

Ich verspreche dir dich zu beschützen

Ich glaube auch nicht das es dir wirklich gut geht mit dem Schritt den du gegangen bist

Und es geht dir nicht gut,egal wie du dich ablenkst,es dir einredest oder sonst was

Unsere Seelen funktionieren nur gemeinsam

Unsere Herzen funktionieren nur gemeinsam

Denn wir gehören zusammen

Egal wie schwer es manchmal erscheint

Egal wie schwer wir es uns gegenseitig machen

Ich werde weiter auf dich warten

Ich werde weiter die Hoffnung für uns nicht aufgeben

Ich glaube an das einmalige,gemeinsame Band zwischen uns

Die Magie,unser Skandinavien,unsere Liebe

Ich liebe dich und werde dich immer lieben

Mein hav,mein Seelenmensch,mon chaton

Komm nach Hause und lass dich fallen

Ich fange dich auf

Ich verspreche es dir

[life-of-lazlo]

A couple of analogue photos

50 years old camera man!

works like a charm, but the focus is hard to nail

loving the challenge

[panda-paradise]

Here's a Valentine's exchange I did for @mike-princeofstars-arts! Featuring Hav and Lii, the adorable rabbit couple from his comic, Minimal All You Are.

You can check out the comic on tumblr and ComicFury!

Here's the alternate version without text:

[sinceileftyoublog]

Strange Case of Dr. Johnson and Matchess

BY JORDAN MAINZER

I've been covering Matchess at SILY for the blog's entire existence, and almost every time I mentioned her for the first time in a piece, I referred to her by her real name as well, Whitney Johnson. In some ways, this is natural, basic journalism, but it was also influenced by my desire to clarify. That is, throughout the years, at times when Johnson has been part of a bill at a show or even one piece of an ensemble, I've seen her presence referred to with both her moniker and her name. She's finally here to say that, at least from an artistic standpoint, the two are no longer interchangeable. Today, Matchess releases her new cassette of found sounds Stena, using her usual combination of synthesizer and viola. Also today, Whitney Johnson releases her debut album Hav, a voiceless exploration of the human body laden with, yes, viola and electronic instruments, but also marimba. Saturday, at Constellation, the two releases, both out via Drag City, will be celebrated by a quintet of Johnson, Haley Fohr, Lula Asplund, Jenny Pulse, and Alan Sparhawk.

Hav and Stena are different sounding records, but they're also intimately related. The field recordings on the albums come from places where Johnson was doing research or participating in a residency, ranging from rural and Southern Sweden to Greece and Cyprus. She started to notice commonalities between the coastal areas, the landscapes, the rocks. Just as the inspirations between the two records merged, so does the result. The songs on Hav are arguably more "healing" sounding than anything on the solfeggio frequency-inspired Stena. "Agora" shimmers like a gong, while the chiming marimba on "Vari", increasing and decreasing in volume and intensity, lulls you into hypnosis. Stena, on the other hand, is much more tactile and reminiscent of tangible sounds that can be perceived by our minds and bodies, from the distorted church bells of "Klara Kyrka" and the crickets of “Biskopskulla Högstena” to the plucked strings of "DNA Repair" and pulsating voice of "Existe".

Hav and Stena diverge and intertwine all at once, just like Whitney Johnson and Matchess. And they'll only continue as separate, but similar artists, in part thanks to Johnson's position as Assistant Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, a tenure track job in the Art & Technology/Sound Practices Department. One class she's teaching in the fall semester is, appropriately, called Doubles, and comes from her own practice, studying "mirrors, alter egos, polarities, doppelgängers, gender binaries, impostors, twins, and shadows" and exploring how it can turn into psychoacoustic illusion like binaural beats. Perhaps a century from now, it's Johnson and Matchess that will be studied in a similar course.

Earlier this month, I spoke to Johnson about Hav and Stena, keeping a diary, field recording, being physically changed by music, and the importance of context in abstract art. Read our conversation below, edited for length and clarity.

Since I Left You: At what point did you know that Hav and Stena would become reflections of each other, released at the same time as a singular, but separate entity?

Whitney Johnson: I think that two different artists or different paths had been developing for quite some time, [but] not until I started making a record did it become clear [to me]. I started doing all my instillation work and more sound work under my own name, but [the listing] would say, "Whitney Johnson (aka Matchess)" for reference. Vice versa, that started happening, [listings] saying "Matchess is doing [such and such]," and then mentioning my name. A lot more live performances were still billed at Matchess, which makes sense for a lot of reasons, but when I started making these [records], I realized how different they had become. The idea of doing a no vocals, ambient record [like Hav] didn't seem to fit into the Matchess world. There are no lyrics; even though the lyrics are always buried, they're a big part of what inspires my work, symbols that keep coming up. Without having text or voice on Hav, I thought it was definitely something else. Also, bringing in marimba, because Matchess is mostly key-based instruments, synthesizers, organ, and then viola.

SILY: The albums are born from your stays in different areas. Stena, you were staying in rural Sweden, and for Hav, you had an artist in residency at Inkonst near the coast.

WJ: This is where they start to blend, because a lot of the field recordings that show up on Stena are from Cyprus and Greece, where I was doing research in 2021. Then, I was doing residencies in Sweden and research in Sweden for a few months, and a few different times I was there, the geographical influences started to blend, too. Places I didn't naturally think of having much in common, suddenly I started seeing all these commonalities between these places: Coastal island culture is a big thing, and the landscapes were surprisingly similar.

SILY: In rural Sweden, you kept an online diary. Had you ever done that before?

WJ: Not really. I feel like that's something social media facilitated. It was easy to drop something in there that was photos, impressions, less personal and more observation and documentation, like images of rocks and water. That's what "hav" and "stena" mean in Swedish, "sea" and "stone." So that became a theme of everything I was collecting. It also turned into this journal.

SILY: Before, had you treated field recordings as your journal, and now, do you feel like you have more ways of capturing where you were?

WJ: Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. I think in the past, field recording for me was a lot about the thing that was making the sound I was recording. "This is a river," or, "This is a gutter. This is a windmill. This is something that sound this exact way," recording spaces and not really having an object I'm recording, but more doing recording in a place. That made me lean into this more text, journal approach, too.

SILY: When did you decide the solfeggio frequencies were something you wanted to explore in your music?

WJ: This is part of a much bigger line of questioning I've had. What is the connection between sound and the body or bodies in general? There's so much out there that's pretty far out. I don't want to say everything that's true has to have scientific evidence. There are things that may be undiscovered. When stuff has no evidence, I'm kind of a skeptic. The solfeggio frequencies are something someone discovered in the 1970s, and their relations to the body are pretty wild. One is called "DNA Repair"; what could that possibly be? There's the "Frequency of God", so already, it's outside the world of observational science. That's part of this much bigger project, brainwave treatments, where I'm like, "What is the connection here?" Passing that question onto the listeners instead of answering that, posing a question with my work to say, "What if this is how this works? What do you experience? How does this affect you?" The solfeggio frequencies were in this line of questioning where, "If I use this frequency as the fundamental for this just intonation piece, is it any different than if I go 1 Hz higher or lower? If it's 528 [Hz], what if it's 529? Is it really that different of an experience?" I don't know. It's a lot about priming. It's a lot about what people expect to experience.

SILY: Has your experience of how you think sound affects the body changed as a result of making these records?

WJ: Yeah, one thing that I can say for sure is tuning to something other than A440 feels significant to me. It could be because of my own history with tuning to that frequency for so long in classical music settings. It's regimented in a way that feels confining or stifling. Opening that up and not using that as my fundamental on the viola feels really good. Almost having perfect pitch--not exactly, but I can pick an A440 out of the air and tune the rest of my instrument to it, but that became such a restriction. I used 432Hz for most of these pieces to open up the possibilities. There's also some interesting dissonance that happens, when there is something that's in 440, these beating patterns and things out of tune in a way I thought sounded cool.

SILY: To my non-trained ears, it's cool when it creates somewhat of a syncopation, or in terms of the Gestalt principle of filling space that's not technically there.

WJ: I've been thinking and doing some reading about missing fundamentals, which is a thing where if you build the harmonic series above something, you don't even need to have that fundamental tone because your brain fills in the gap. It is kind of the Gestalt of sound.

SILY: It's something you notice that you're finding words or frameworks for that formalize it.

WJ: Absolutely. When I was working at Dream House many years ago now, I was having a very direct aesthetic connection to what I was hearing, and I didn't understand it at all. I didn't understand just intonation or other tuning systems. I was just wide open, wide-eyed, taking it all in, but I really liked what I heard. I knew it was lighting up some part of my brain that had never been scratched. I started to dig into what was going on and how it was composed, and it opened a whole new world.

SILY: Have you had the experience of feeling physically changed by live music, especially at an extreme volume?

WJ: Yes, absolutely. That happens to me just as frequently with noise as it does with some sort of sound healing, like gong bath. A really good harsh noise performance like Merzbow can feel just as cleansing.

SILY: Are the videos you've released so far made of footage you had collected while studying?

WJ: The video for "In Sleep" is completely from Greece and Cyprus, some significant rocks that are marked as ruins, part of some ancient structure, and a bunch of rocks that were mundane, or not a special rock. I liked putting those together in that video, where you can't tell whether something's a sacred stone or cultural heritage site or just a random rock. The other one for "Vari" was all footage from Sweden from the coast.

SILY: You really did switch around the sonic and visual references between the albums, even thought a lot of the track names are consistently referential to places. For instance, “Klara Kyrka” is a church in Stockholm. Are the church bells in the song from there?

WJ: Yeah, that's a field recording of those, distorted and buried beneath many layers of fuzz. That was kind of fun, too, all these doubles that came up in this doubles project that were sometimes in line with the thing, and sometimes reversed or flipped. Sea and stones, Sweden, Greece and Cyprus regions, keeping them in line, but one thing will be out of place that draws your attention to the double again.

SILY: Did the experience of incorporating these field recordings into an album make you want to do it more in the future, wherever you might be studying, to establish that relationship between place and music in the same way?

WJ: Yes, that felt really good. A lot of it is pretty subtle. I played some of these recordings wondering what I would do with them, whether they were [more appropriate] for an installation setting. They're almost silent, so it opens up an imaginative world. I did an artist talk where I played these recordings, and you couldn't really hear much, but all I said was, "These are the recordings of these sacred sites for the cult of worshippers for the Greek diety Hermaphroditus." Giving that much context, there was this whole imaginative thing that happened in people's minds where they were listening to kind of nothing, but the sense of place and time added to the interpretation. I love [recording] wherever I'm going, or even just the sounds of my life, myself living.

SILY: Are you the type of listener who wants to know the context of what you're listening to before you hear it?

WJ: I'm of two or three minds about it. Sometimes, I want to read something and know what it is first and have it guide me or give me something to hang on to or an anchor. [Other times,] I want to listen to something without knowing a thing. I feel the same way about film. Sometimes, I want to read about a film and understand what I'm getting into, but [other times,] I want to be totally surprised. It's also cool, for something that's time-based, to [read about it] while you're listening. It actually puts my attention on the thing. If I'm listening to a record, looking at the liner notes or an insert or booklet, I'm having this experience of sound that's integrated. It's visual, textual, and listening, and you can make it into an experience instead of what for me is so often background music, [where] I'll put something on and get up and do the dishes. [laughs]

SILY: I agree with you. I switch back and forth. I at least try once with everything, especially if I'm writing about it, to actively sit down and look at the context before or during the listening experience, even if the very first listening experience might be passive. For an ambient record, the possibilities are so vast, that it can be misleading if you go into it cold.

WJ: Definitely. There's also space to respect the artist there, too. If somebody gives you a big conceptual statement, it's important to incorporate that as much as you can. Some people really resist that, too, and say, "This is just sound or music. You can tell what an artist wants you to do with it."

SILY: What else are you working on at the moment?

WJ: A few different things. I've got some film stuff coming up. There's a new project I'm working on that involves field recording of my daily life. I feel like that's pretty exciting. I can imagine it turning into an A/V installation project, but right now, it's just collecting recordings. Field recording my life could be traveling but also at home, like cooking. There's also a piece called FIAT I did in Berlin in 2023, and I'm proposing that to lots of people to do in 2025, to bring that back. To say it's "fun" is weird, but it's very transformative for me. It's a 4-hour-long solo viola and electronics piece with no breaks. I'm seated, and my arm is moving repetitively between strings for four hours straight, and everything else I'm doing is with my left hand. I'm able to clamp my viola with my chin and be working with a synthesizer and any other electronics like a mixer to bring things in, but my right arm is just going for four hours straight. It's really challenging and feels like public meditation. I'm trying to see where that can happen next.

SILY: Is there anything you've been listening to, watching, or reading that you've found inspiring?

WJ: I'm in the last pages of the new Rachel Cusk book called Parade. It's incredible and life-changing. It's about an artist named G, and the artist takes lots of different forms, so you don't know if it's one person or many artists named G. It might be different iterations of what an artist can be. It's pretty abstract, but I've really related with several of the versions of G who I've encountered. The writing is so good, so incisive, a lot that's directly about gender but a lot that's not, just about art making generally. You see how through the storytelling, gender is a part of that, but there are very clear moments where you can see, "This is what it means to be a female-identifying artist."

SILY: You're teaching at SAIC now, including a class on Doubles. Has your teaching ever mirrored your music practice as much as it does now?

WJ: No, and I think it's an opportunity of being full-time. I can design my own classes. It feels like such a privilege to speak for my practice.