Wobbly - Popular Monitress (2021)

Voices captured and edited 2015-2020.

Special guests: Mark Hosler - Guitar on “Lent Foot”. Drew Daniel - Rhythm programming on “Every Piano”

Mastered by Thomas Dimuzio. Album artwork by Max Allison.

Thanks to: Evans Hankey (for the loan), Zeena Parkins, Jennifer Walshe, Doug & Max, Seth & Seeta, Drew & Martin, Emma & Méabh and especially my parents.

Like its predecessor ‘Monitress’, this is an album about machine listening. Once again my mobile phones and tablets are running pitch trackers and synth apps, converting the sounds they hear into error-prone melodies. The trackers are solely reflexive — they can’t learn, or remember — but they output sounds of unarbitrary complexity, or — music. But one less defined as a form of self-expression, and more as a model of relationships within society, specifically those relationships being formed between ourselves and our tools.

If the last album focused more on improvisations and abstraction, this time around I prepared more in the way of ‘tunes’ ahead of time before turning them over to the trackers. I also let myself push the results around a little more. The title is less ironic than a long standing sense that the music you don’t like yet is the music most likely to come in handy.