Jennifer walshe: ALL THE MANY PEOPLS

Released by Migro Records, May 31 2019.

ALL THE MANY PEOPLS is Walshe’s “difficult” second solo album, the recording of which proved exceedingly difficult. After multiple attempts to record the album ended in disaster, the most notable of which culminated in a sound engineer absconding with Walshe’s masters, Migro is very excited to finally shepherd ALL THE MANY PEOPLS into the world.

“With manic intensity, caustic wit, and an acute ear for the symptomatic points where linguistic clichés crack open to reveal human fears and longings, Jennifer Walshe has found our culture’s search history, and she is singing its network into vibrant being.” – Drew Daniel, liner notes for ALL THE MANY PEOPLS

ALL THE MANY PEOPLS is structured in two parts - I: IN GLORIOUS MONO and II: I STILL LOVE YOU NEW YORK. Relevant and also not relevant to each: Lojban, a language constructed entirely according to the rules of predicate logic; the cast of Lohengrin; certain sections from Watt by Samuel Beckett constituting the first examples of process composition; The Public Enemy (1931) starring James Cagney; KRS-One; US and British soldiers making cell-phone videos of themselves blowing things up and uploading the videos to YouTube; Even Dwarfs Started Small; Amazon.com message boards about vampire physiology; sferics; conspiracy theorist Francis E. Dec; detritus from video game voice-overs; August Strindberg; The Typing of the Dead; cult Irish martial arts film Fatal Deviation; the collective unconscious as evidenced by Google Autocomplete; Courage Wolf; 4Chan.

Written over the course of 2010-12, and since performed all over the world to critical acclaim, ALL THE MANY PEOPLS is a reflection of the state of the web as it was back then. It’s an album about how it feels to live and write in an environment saturated with information, laced with layers of dead websites and outdated memes piled up as linguistic and sonic sediment. There is no false nostalgia here – while the album was written in what may seem like more ‘innocent’ times, before Pepe, ubiquitous trolling and the events of 2016, nevertheless the content is eerily prescient of the world we now find ourselves in.

An album of the year in The Quietus and The Wire.

“…manic, cobbled, and unquestionably a product of the internet, but much like the best meme aggregators, its seemingly haphazard presentation is actually serious, well-considered, and a creative act in itself. With that in mind, ALL THE MANY PEOPLS might be compared to someone whispering meme texts in your ear for nearly an hour: it's surreal and occasionally uncomfortable, but it's also a barrel of laughs.”

Dustin Krcatovich, The Quietus, June 2019

”Over a fluid soundscape of field recordings, electronic drones, blasts of noise, and video game bleeps, she unspools a dizzying, often absurdly humorous bricolage of conspiracy theories, song lyrics, and online detritus in a meaningfully disorienting barrage. Seemingly random phrases take on new contextual meaning, both revealing and ridiculous. Walshe’s gift is that the work transcends any theoretical grounding to provide a mix of hilarity and claustrophobia, all meticulously paced and bursting with her outsize personality.”

Pete Margasek, Best of Bandcamp Contemporary Classical, June 2019

“…it is Walshe’s projection of her inner congregation, bewildering and exhilaratingly various, that energises and configures this composition. At one point the inflection of Walshe’s voice seems consciously to pay homage to Robert Ashley, which is apt. She shares his linguistic resourcefulness, compositional daring, ironic perspectives, insight into critical vectors of contemporary culture and unique character as a performer.”

Julian Cowley, The Wire, August 2019