New Music From Wobbly, YATTA
Wobbly
Monitress
(Hausu Mountain)
The electronic methods used on Wobbly’s new album Monitress remind this critic of the “telephone” party game, where a person whispers a phrase to another person who repeats the phrase to another person until the last person says it aloud; usually by that time, the phrase has been mangled, often hilariously.
One can use Google Translate to do a variation of this; just now, this writer ran the sentence “Your mother knits socks in a well” through several languages, ending up with the phrase “I wore socks with my mom”.
Wobbly’s version of the telephone game uses multiple iPhones, each using a pitch-tracking app and a synthesizer. Using a mixer, a source audio signal is sent to a phone, which detects which notes are being played and then plays those notes on the synth output.
Since the pitch-tracking app isn’t perfect, it can spit out the “wrong” notes—but that’s where the strange and wonderful magic happens.
Monitress sounds completely bonkers, like an unpredictable robot that has lost its marbles, but among the dense chaos, there’s a sense of play and mostly giddy joy, rather than oppressive obnoxiousness.
Starting with keyboard improvisations as source material, Wobbly (a.k.a. Jon Leidecker, a current member of Negativland) triggers his iPhone arsenal to act as bizarre harmonizers, and some tracks are tethered to beats.
Like “Respectables” where the rhythms act as a skeleton framework barely containing the musical goo that drips out, or “One Trillionth” with a strict march rhythm to accompany an actual synth vamp among the madness.
Among the album’s odd charms are “Medieval Refrigerator” sporting vague Ren-fair synth melodies that are cutely distorted and warped and “Information Free” which hovers in a kosmische haze with an uncertain holding pattern.
Like a string of smartphone auto-correct atrocities, Monitress is more like the sound of something delightfully ridiculous than something infuriatingly wrong.
YATTA
Wahala
(PTP)
“Maya Angelou says to keep a room in your heart just for god. My room is full of rage, questions, confusion, and pain—I’m trying to get it clean and pristine, baby!”
So wrote the Sierra Leonean-American, Brooklyn-based artist Yatta Zoker (simply known as YATTA) for their recordings, in the context of their fascinatingly cluttered second album, Wahala.
In the Krio language, spoken in Sierra Leone, “wahala” means “trouble”, and on the album YATTA grapples with dozens of emotions and internal voices, often using vocal sample loops and sliced and diced snippets that can be stabbing or lulling and anything in-between.
For example, “Blues” sports exclamations, interjections and unclassifiable wordless vocals (“nyah nyah nyah”) while “Cowboys” offers alien pitch-shifted vocal harmonies among sound fragments and blasts.
On the opening track “A Lie”, YATTA discusses the concept of survival—for their parents, it was having food, but for them, “...it is having my feet on the ground and hoping that nobody notices when my brain flies away” as the hiss from the “s” in the word “parents” is sustained, adding a disquieting tension.
When singing, YATTA often uses a sort of jazz lounge or blues approach with a gentle vibrato, with that warmth sharply contrasting with the artificial building blocks of her sonic room.
It’s an album packed with such disconnects, from the reverberating voices on “Shine” that are simultaneously eerie and comforting, to the ominous tones of the perhaps ironically titled “I Will Definitely Feel Good”.
However, alongside YATTA’s anxieties is a sense of humor which is a vital aspect of the album. On “Bliss” punctuated with majestic tones of a virtual procession, YATTA says, “Feels good when I drink coffee and run around in circles and feel like I have nothing left but to WIN!”
Another facet of Wahala ponders the immense universe. “Galaxies beyond galaxies beyond galaxies” mentioned by collaborator Kaafoe Zoker on the track “Galaxies” and the concept of infinite, simultaneous realities, on the closing track “Underwater, Now”.
A cause of suffering, YATTA concludes, is that the human mind can’t handle multiple realities. It’s this perplexing conflict that YATTA adeptly represents on Wahala with a million inner voices shouting out.