ABOUT THE ARTIST:

Wilhelm Matthies, although born in Ohio, in 1959 and raised in South Carolina, has lived in the midwest of the USA for about half of his life now.

While earning his masters degree in painting and printmaking in the early 80’s,
he developed a love for new classical music hearing performances of Schoenberg, Berg, Xenakis as well as performances by student composers and performers.

In the mid to late 80’s Wilhelm performed in Chicago art galleries using prepared guitars and a prepared mandolin while also listening to free improvisation and free jazz performed live.

In the late 80’s he designed and built several invented instruments that he resumed working on in the 2000’s. In 2011 Wilhelm began creating, posting and collaborating to make music with various artists associated with SoundCloud including Paul Mimlitsch,, Mehata Hiroshi (Mehata Sentimental Legend), Megan Lee Karls, Paulo Chagas, Maresuke Okamato, Matthias Boss using his instrument the kokeka. RiverFoot-Reality Rubs was the first album he released using the kokeka.

Beginning in March 2012, Wilhelm Matthies has been developing another new instrument called the mosesa, creating several albums, first with Paulo Chagas (“Lark Markings”) with Matteo Marchisano-Adamo (“blue lake, gathering shore” to be released with Somehow Recordings in 2013), Joel Taylor (“dawn” still being worked on), Pedro Duarte (“fields” still being worked on), Sleeping On Lotus Ashes (“taking to piece, heaping together’), and Marco Lucchi (“cliff notes, expanding waves”).

ABOUT THE TRACK:

This piece was specifically composed and performed to AN MOKU’s
that I participate in a compilation album dedicated to helping the hearing disabled.

I was very excited about the posiblility of making a piece that addresses careful listening in several dimensions. Overall, I wanted the graphic composition to reveal structures which re-occur in varied ways volumetrically and timbrally. The basic composition is performed in 4 cyclical variations in two different takes. I hope that the subtle shifts in timing, pitch and especially tone color challenge and reward careful listening. My hope is that the way the piece has repeated structures with variations taps into the sense of deeper rituals that we practice in our every day life, and furthermore, both deepens and liberates us from those structures.

Silence is an integral and necessary part of this piece; it is integrated to serve such aspects as full rest and absence to slightly louder gestures, i.e.. a range of silences-a range of absent and sounded gestures.

The piece was performed using the mosesa 2D, an instrument dedicated mostly to bowing in this particular piece. This accoustic instrument (that was recorded with two microphones), that I am developing, uses plastic bottle resonators in a construction that lends itself to the whole spectrum of string tone generation. The structure of the instrument makes playing harmonics and partials very accesable. The plastic bottles support a tendancy to a a breathy, earthy tone quality which is both odly similar to the viol family of sound qualities, yet distinct and unique in itself.

This piece, “window thaw, morning light,” takes full advantage of the mosesa 2D sound qualities, and with its cyclical variations structure, is meant to support and celebrate hearing itself.

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