#also i've lived in rural areas and cities and i've had jobs in both places

[iguessitsjustme]

I just started angry wheezing

[victoriansecret]

I'm in my mid-30s and my ever-growing love for history has spurred me to consider a career change into the field. I'd love to work in a museum or archive in a research or curatorship role (rather than as an academic), and I live somewhere where I could take time out to get a masters degree.

From your experience - is a change like this feasible? Is there work available? Will a late (re)start be a hindrance to getting a foot in? Is a degree worth it, or should I aim to get volunteer experience instead? Or am I better off sticking with my current decent office job and treating historical research as a passion/free-time activity instead?

This is a great question, and I wanted to give you as good an answer as possible so I outsourced to a friend and former colleague who worked in collections. This is what she had to say: *follow the Emerging Museum Professional FB page. There is lots of advice there

*I don’t think it’s ever too late to follow your dreams. You’re in your mid-30s, not 99! (Although even then I’d say go for it!)

* I’d recommend volunteering at a place you would be interested in working in. It’ll give you a better sense whether or not this is actually a field you’d like to get into, or just a fun hobby. Both answers are totally ok

* I’m a fan of experience over degrees, but it really depends on where you would want to work. Many positions require a masters degree, but not all. If you are in a small town, or more rural area, it would be easier to talk your way into a position than if you are in a big city

* if you’ve loved history for a long time, try to articulate how skills you have in your hobby or through your office jobs relate to the museum field. I used to manage cafes and found that many of those skills transitioned into collections management (inventory, databasing, customer interactions, etc.)

Best of luck! ---

I will echo her point that it's definitely not too late and if it's something you're truly passionate about it's worth at least considering. Obviously it's not always that simple - giving up a stable, decent job is a risk etc., so while I'm generally not a fan of volunteer work, it might be worth trying it just to see if it's something you would like as much as you think. I will also agree with her point about experience over degrees. I've never been to college at all myself, which is a huge rarity in this field, and when I got my first museum job my only work experience was running a salad bar at a restaurant. But my supervisor told me, years after the fact, that part of why she gave me an interview was that in my cover letter I made an analogy comparing running a salad bar to being a historic interpreter: something about how being in the middle of the dining room meant the bar and by extension myself were always on display, and how that would mean I'd be more comfortable with thousands of guests seeing me in period clothing etc. Granted, interpreting is very much about talking and making analogies to help guests understand the past, so it's a bit different from the behind the scenes work in how those skills translate, and how demonstrating an ability to talk is directly related to the work itself, but still. I hope this is helpful, and I hope that if you do decide to pursue this it works out how you hope! Thanks for the question!

[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.

[taenys]

i've just read some of the personal posts you wrote about your dating life and i'm like giiiiirl fuck these men 😭😭 i'm so sorry that they all SUCK this hard. i've been a super casual lurker for over a decade and if i remember correctly you used to identify as bi/pan at some point? are there any cute girls in your area or is it literally fuckboy city rn?

no girls. or if there are, they're all polyamorous (portland, oregon is big in the poly scene...) or "ethically non monogamous." the few girls i've matched with ghosted me relatively quickly so we never actually got to an in-person date. too many femmes, not enough butch women (my preference). very slim pickings, and girls are much more selective and we all want to be pursued lol so no one is doing the pursuing LOL. no one wants to make the first move.

men on the other hand, will fuck anything with a hole so i've always got hundreds of dudes matching with me and making "an effort" (at least in the beginning lol) so i've only been dating dudes for now.

also, i live an hour away from portland, so i'm actually in a small EXTREMELY CONSERVATIVE little rural town so another issue is the distance. even when i match with girls in the portland area, none of them can drive and ain't no way i'm killing myself to drive downtown portland to meet them LOL so dudes it is for now. they all love to drive (usually) so that's at least never an issue.

i have one guy left that i still talk to, but he's so busy with 3 jobs with evening and weekend hours, he responds to my texts like twice a week (and rarely flirts back lmao ugh). idek what we're doing anymore lol. i get that he's busy and tired and probably not in a place to be dating (and definitely not prioritizing it anymore). we matched in march and had a really good connection and 3 great dates, but then my summer schedule started and now we both are working like crazy and our schedules don't align as well. i keep telling myself to stop initiating contact, but then i'll crack after 3-4 days or he'll do my favorite thing and randomly send me a selfie and i'm back to chasing, waiting, and hoping for another date. he's so cute and so fun. but he's married to his work lol he legit has no days off right now.

but considering how busy i am at work right now too, i’ve stopped actively dating. i deleted all my profiles on all the apps back in may and i don’t plan on opening them up again until october. i need some time on my own. but i’ll keep that last dude on the back burner until he straight out tells me he’s not interested lol i like him too much and he’s stuck around the longest 😂 he’s the main character from the bear, carmy. he’s a professional chef who works at 3 different restaurants and is EXTREMELY passionate and dedicated to his craft, he legit has no free time. he only had one job when we first met so he had mondays off and so did i so that’s when we could meet up but now we both work pretty much all the time so i don’t view his “ignoring” as fuckboy behavior. he’s just genuinely busy working all the time 😭

[iwasafraidideatyourbrains]

Im I'm you. I've lived in a town with a population of 5000 (& I don't think they understand when farmers drive to work its...literally fields for miles) and now I live in a major city with shit transportation. Ive had cars in both. And been carless in both.

In the country my and my peers lives were bettered by having YES AT LEAST 2 CARS per household bc no one leaves for work at the same time, stay at home moms deserve to drive their kids to the hospital in an emergency bc it's a 30 minute drive from our town, etc. Not having a car at all was a hell sentence. There were NO RESOURCES in walking distance!

In the city having a car as a single person was it's own hell. The level of packed streets and places to be with no where to park was stressful, dangerous and expensive. I would not care if I had a car here if my public transportation was decent. For reference I live in Detroit and public transport here is dangerous, random as hell routes not updated properly in decades, and !!!! it only covers a small portion of City of Detroit. All the surrounding suburbs filled with as many doctors, dentists, jobs and places you may need to go? No bus. Only Lyft and it is VERY expensive to lyft that far from mid Detroit. But I also didn't love nearly getting carjacked, worrying about my car on the street, getting parking tickets over minor stuff constantly and having to contest them when they were frequently actual bunk cause cops don't pay attention to the TIMES on no parking spaces here.

In the country my car was the answer to whether or not I got to have an existence outside my home. In the city my car was basically a weapon against me I came to dislike. The only reason I'm stressed I don't have a car is public transport is so poorly here, and Lyft is SO expensive.

But I'm not new. This information is KNOWN. So how hard should it be. To select when an area is rural, suburban or urban and then on purpose (this is going to sound very leftie of me but hang on) I'm saying ON PURPOSE we strive for each individual community to have the transportation needs for their area BEST MET. Because as it stands rural people need more help affording vehicles and repairs, and we here in the city need transportation that doesn't cost enough to ruin your life if you're poor AND is simultaneously not horribly dangerous and nonsensical.

I agree that we need good public transportation in America and our utter dependence on cars is bad but why are so many people expressing this sentiment as “we should get rid of cars” why do people frame their good points in the way that is as hostile and confusing to people who aren’t “in on it” as possible