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 new 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. We previously presented his video for ‘Shifting,’ where murky processing pushes, pulls shifts and drifts, creating a weird, beautiful and strangely emotional work. You can find it here. This piece ‘The beach, the sea, the waves’ is based around a ¾ Nylon string guitar he bought his 7 year old last Christmas. It seems he well, kinda ‘borrowed’ it, revisiting his own teenage years, before processing the bejesus out of it.
This is what he has to say about it:
“Using my phone as a sketch recording engine, I played loops and small ideas and short moments that had stuck with me. I’d then use guitar pedals to manipulate these recordings, sending them to a vintage Audio Technica RMX64, a 1980’s recording console and cassette 4 track loaned from Newcastle-based musician Tim McPhee. He had restored it and it was soaked in a bizarre and wild arcane magic. It sparked a renewed interest in me to explore the making, the cutting up and seeing how and where sound could be pushed to.”
Slipped is out now via Room40. You can find it here.
