San Francisco-based multimedia artist, composer, and improviser Jon Leidecker makes music under the pseudonym Wobbly. He is an active member of both the seminal experimental group Negativland, and with the Thurston Moore Group. Additional Kids, Wobbly’s third release on Hausu Mountain, is a song cycle that introduces a strain of Leidecker’s music rarely heard in his wide-ranging solo catalog: mutated pop music with vocal performances from a diverse guest list of singers appearing on nearly every track. Far from conforming to any standard playbook, Wobbly’s conception of pop can’t help but get warped and refracted through his idiosyncratic tonal sensibilities and his irreverent sense of humor. In consort with the constantly surprising turns of each guest artist’s vocal performance, Additional Kids carries on Leidecker’s ever-bewildering high-definition synthesis practice and his confounding production decisions as he builds tracks from staccato bursts of synth, clanging percussion, and garbled swathes of glitched texture. Wobbly considers Additional Kids to be a “multi-generational album about generations” and explains that it was “originally recorded in the early 2000s from the perspective of a bunch of friends asking themselves the question of whether or not to have kids while in their early 30s, then finished 15 years later in their late 40s after some of them had, and some of them hadn’t.” Instead of wallowing in the trappings of pro- or anti-natalism, Wobbly and his collaborators cast themselves as jesters who can deflate these heavy existential considerations through parody and exaggeration, through abrasion and delight.
Additional Kids features contributions from: 0th, Liz Albee, Kevin Blechdom, Blevin Blectum, Anne Bourne, DemonSleeper, Dina Emerson, Dominique Leone, Mai Lingani, Ana Machado, Anne McGuire, Marisa Elene Nadieja, Kanoko Nishi-Smith, John Oswald, Phipps Pt., Danishta Rivero, Sue-C, Shatter Pattern, and Pamela Z.
