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***Drawing inspiration from John Oswald's classic acts of sonic appropriation, Wobbly responds to an increasingly corporate radio landscape by personalizing the popular. Sidestepping the info-glut, Wobbly gets jiggy with a jigsaw, hurls house anthems down the stairs, and commits acts of cut-and-paste ventriloquism that are creepily accurate and hilarious. As stand-alone blasts or as an extended composition, Wild Why has the structural rigor of New Music from the academy and the sue-me bravado of label-mate Kid 6ye6. Executed with a strong sense of humor and without a laptop in sight, Wild Why is a brilliantly ambitious guerilla strike on popular music. Sounding like every hip hop battle record ever made playing angrily at once, Wild Why pummels the unwary listener with a Niagara Falls of sonic information. Several thousand hours of raw audio were gathered from corporate hip hop radio stations in the San Francisco Bay Area, digested and broken down to micro-samples of their constituent tics, gasps, and stabs. Wobbly has created the plunderphonic bastard child of Grandmaster Flash and Charles Ives, the result of three years of painstaking downtime with the sampler. The relentless cut-up frenzy on Wild Why has been edited down to the nanosecond with speed-freak precision. Ninety-nine percent of the source material is brutally familiar, a popular playlist of hits everyone's been bombarded with for the last ten years as mandated by focus groups, lawyers and taste-makers. Occasional strategic counter-blasts of sampled '60s free jazz and 1920s Cotton Club pop music lace Wobbly's fragmentation of today's hit parade with unsettling anachronism and/or historical context. The result is both an obsessive-compulsive love letter to hip hop radio and a withering assault on its clichés and formulas. Growing up in the suburbs on a solid diet of Henry Cow and Faust records, Wobbly now lives in San Francisco and works as a tester for a large music / technology company. He crashes software for a living. Not just another glitch poster child, he is currently involved in collaborations with People Like Us, Chopping Channel (a live improv project featuring Don Joyce and Peter Conheim of Negativland) and Bay Area noise guru Thomas Dimuzio. - Longtime cohort and collaborator with Bay Area electronic arts luminaries
- Wide appeal to fans of electronica, glitch, experimental music and crazed cutup plunderphonics
- Wobbly is a regular presence at highly acclaimed festivals all over the world and at local and national gigs from coast to coast
30-second RealAudio excerpts: [excerpt] If you have a recent version of iTunes software on your computer, clicking on the link immediately below should open the iTunes application and take you to the iTunes Music Service page-- where you can listen to samples and buy this album, or individual tracks: Wobbly "Wild Why" (Tigerbeat6) For a complete listing of Midheaven exclusive albums available for download from the iTunes Music service, please visit the Midheaven Mailorder/Revolver USA Downloadables page. |
