J.WLSN is the musical project of Jonathan Wilson, a musician and curator who lives and works on Gadigal land in Sydney, Australia. Wilson’s music is increasingly based around his children and using traditional instrumentation and abstracting them via tape machines and electronic processing. His forthcoming album Slipped, sees him using a myriad of ingredients all smooshed together in a beautiful drifting smudge of sound. Sound sources include melded nylon guitar loops, FM synths, minimal Buchla 200 modules, a cassette tape delay, electric guitar, guitar pedals, dictaphone-based field recordings of the piano, random people, his kids and family. The result is pieces like ‘Shifting,’ where murky processing pushes, pulls shifts and drifts, creating a weird, beautiful and strangely emotional work. The video is simarly processed (I’m kinda obsessed with the grass).
This is what J.WLSN has to say about it:
“My partner and I have two children and they are everything all at once. Pure joy to complete chaos in a single moment, but worth it all the time. Born 4 years and 1 day apart, I have filmed them, filmed with them, recorded them, and recorded with them constantly for the last 8 years. This collaged vignette of music and moving image features my two boys ecstatically running towards the back of the land I grew up in. Known to us as Wychwood Farm, the 5-acre Western Sydney property, which has remained unchanged, while the areas around have gone through the standard suburban overhauls, has informed so much of my music. It is the one place I always feel home, the sky is wide and grass is endless. So here it is, the vista and our boys enjoying the green and vastness of this place.”
Slipped will be released via Room40 on the 3rd of November 2023. You can find it here.
