Matchess Sonescent

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. As this practice settled in and around her, Whitney heard the things not always focused upon: first, tinnitus . . . then, breathing . . . the heartbeat, and another pulsing (something unknown, but familiar). So she listened to the sound of her body. After a time, her mind became involved, and she began to hear songs. It was after she'd returned from the desert that she wrote down what she'd heard, to the best of her ability.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.In the past decade, Matchess' music has traversed outer and inner space, searching patiently for the unseen world that exists behind the world that we see everyday. When compared with the present work, the trilogy of albums released on Trouble In Mind from 2013-2018 utilized Whitney's writing and playing abilities with relative extroversion; her mixes actively deploying instruments and songs in what might be called a traditional manner, the music tapping magestically into classical, folk, electronic and psychedelic antecedents. To listen to these records is to hear someone deep in meditation making music.With Soncescent, the record is the sound of the meditation itself with the music existing in an atmosphere that would properly represent its fragile nature, the delicate sound of something almost completely disintegrated. Here, inspirat...