Cheryl E. Leonard, Wobbly

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.

The first three tracks originated as late night radio broadcasts, and were carefully reedited from the duo’s performances on Negativland’s legendary "Over The Edge" program. Source 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.