Monitoria’s West offers a sample-heavy sound collage that is as jolting as it is captivating.
Have you ever wondered what it might sound like to rapidly scroll through your TikTok For You page while watching the evening news as the sound of your neighbor’s radio drifts in through your open window? If yes, then you will appreciate Monitoria’s most recent release, West. The six-track digital album is an experimental sound collage that uses material from radio, television, music, and online content to patch together a jarring and thought-provoking sonic arrangement.
Monitoria is a project run by Jodi Spitz, a Boston-based artist who, according to her Bandcamp page, enjoys stitching together huge quantities of audio, following a “stream-of-consciousness” creative process. The songs heard on this particular record were all recorded, produced, and mixed from December of 2020 to August of this year.
In a sound collage, one grows accustomed to being wrenched from one sonic experience to another. As much is clear in Monitoria’s work: in the first track, aptly titled “West I” (all six tracks follow this naming-convention), the listener hears a constant juggling of 93 KHJ’s radio station tag; a couple of popular songs including Miki Mastubara’s “Mayonaka no Door / Stay With Me,” Kanye West’s “Gold Digger,” and Nicki Minaj’s “Roman Holiday;” and various snippets from television. “West II” is no less cluttered, drawing on Frank Zappa’s “Sleeping in a Jar,” an advertisement for the Amazon Echo, and video game sound effects.
Such an agglomeration of media and content that only occasionally have disparate connections to one another can feel overwhelming at times. Yet, the technical side of Monitoria’s work shows high quality engineering. By pitching audio clips up and down, panning sound from left to right in the listener’s earbuds, or using heavy amounts of reverb, Monitoria seamlessly transitions from one sound to another. For example, a shorter track like “West IV” transitions from a Smokey the Bear Fire Prevention PSA that aired in the 70s to a car screeching, followed by Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA,” before concluding with an eerie voice that repeats the phrase “friends die” several times over. By repeating various samples time and time again throughout the course of a particular track, the listener is left with tastes of familiarity in the vast platter of audio content.
Beyond the sonic qualities of the album, Monitoria also touches on some broader issues through her work. By sampling material such as Richard Nixon’s phone conversation with the Apollo 11 astronauts or the “Star Spangled Banner,” the Boston artist provides a critical commentary on the convergence of multimodal media consumption and American politics. In particular, by juxtaposing media and music characteristic of American patriotism with a vast soundscape of radio, music, television, and social media content, Monitoria provokes one to consider how pride for one’s country can seep into a plethora of content, and thus, become mindlessly consumed.
Monitoria’s West is best appreciated as one would admire the visual cousin of a sound collage: a piece to be studied, thought about, picked apart, and, ultimately, valued as a work of art.