Description
Event Details:
Date: Friday, September 19th, 2025
Time: 7PM
Venue: MUSE Sturgeon Bay
Directions: 330 Jefferson Street, Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin 54235. On the corner of Third Avenue and Jefferson Street in downtown Sturgeon Bay.
Phone: 920-333-2859
Email: tickets@musesturgeonbay.com
About the Artist:
“I am living a double life.” This is how Whitney Johnson, AKA Matchess, once described the co-existence of her alter egos: the musical entity Matchess, and the sociologist of sound known in academia as Whitney Johnson. With the dual existence of her albums Hav and Stena, these two identities now stretch and twist across each other to create hypnotic, engaging new parallels: two distinct albums from two different artists.
Hav and Stena are a co-existing pair of records — one from Whitney, the other from Matchess — that challenge linear description. Perhaps the best way to think about these two releases is the idea of doubles: doppelgangers, alter egos, evil twins, mirrors, polarities, impostors, shadows. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Dr. Whitney Johnson and Matchess! The upstanding researcher, and the deranged artist.
As an artist, Whitney Johnson uses sound to explore relationships between bodies and minds. Based in Chicago, she composes, performs, and installs multi-channel sound with viola, sine waves, Max/MSP, organ, synthesizers, vocalization, tape looping, and field recording.
As artist-in-residence at Elektronmusikstudion (EMS) in Stockholm and Inkonst in Malmö, Sweden, her latest LP, Hav (2024, Drag City), composed sine waves, marimba, viola, ARP Odyssey synthesizer, and Halldorophone into a multi-channel performance-installation. As Matchess, the Stena cassette (2024, Drag City) embodies an alter ego to join the cult of Hermaphroditus in Cypriot and Greek antiquity.
In tandem with her sound practice, she received her doctorate in the sociology of sound from the University of Chicago in 2018. In 2022, she completed a postdoctoral research fellowship on sound and technology in the Centre for Gender Research at Uppsala Universitet, Sweden, and she is an artist-in-residence at Q-O2 Brussels in 2025. She is currently Assistant Professor of Art and Technology/Sound Practices at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
