Cheryl E. Leonard & Wobbly 'Multiple Park' LP (GGGR-123)

Cheryl E. Leonard builds and plays electroacoustic instruments made out of natural materials such as bones, driftwood, shells, seaweed, feathers, and stones. Jon Leidecker (aka 'Wobbly') responds to the sounds of her creations with synthesized animal voices driven by machine listening. The inaugural collaboration of these two veterans of the San Francisco Bay Area electronic music scene can be heard on the album Multiple Park, a collection of works assembled from both studio and outdoor performances, radio broadcasts and field recordings, as well as outright hallucinations — an album which evokes an abstract yet literal world that exists in the space between city life and utter wilderness. Material for the album’s centerpiece was recorded in three California parks, ranging from deeply urban to abandoned to entirely wild. The result is one “Multiple Park,” filled with noises simultaneously abstract yet bound to the physical events that generated them. Riding a line between a secret history of electronic music that aspires to birdsong, and those dedicated to the preservation of vanishing biophonies, Multiple Park is a visceral meditation on the sounds of “the outdoors,” and how those sounds are changed and framed by our technologically accelerating lives. Cheryl E. Leonard has been composing and improvising with materials from the natural world since the late 1990s. Her performance and recorded history includes many collaborations - notably with Euphotic (Tom Djll & Bryan Day), Thomas Carnacki, Big City Orchestra, and Phillip Greenlief. Jon Leidecker has been creating experimental work since 1987: both solo and in collaboration (People Like Us, Matmos), as a member of Negativland since 2011, a current producer of Over The Edge on KPFA, as well as contributing electronics to the current incarnation of the Thurston Moore Group.