Ambient Performers at Anodyne in Walker’s Point

Integral to the experience will be visuals projected on screen by Gordon’s Wire Works. The Milwaukee multi-media artist conjures morphic geometric, psychedelic patterns based on the beats and pulses of the music being produced on stage.

by

Local Music

You wouldn’t guess from hearing the ambient electronica of Wavefiler, but at the beginning was … Michael Jackson? “I was very influenced by him when I was a kid growing up in the ‘80s,” says Steve Zydek, aka Wavefiler. MJ introduced him to synthesizers and ideas of sonic production, priming him for Grandmaster Flash and Run DMC. After a college-age digression into punk rock, he regained interest in synthesizers and discovered Brian Eno.

Zydek found his way into a small, thriving subculture of analog geeks, ambient enthusiasts, Krautrock aficionados and other enlightened misfits in Milwaukee and elsewhere. In one of many ironies, the worldwide web has connected disparate musicians who prefer patches to digital files. Zydek produced Wired Explorations Vol. 1, a 2020 album that compiled tracks by likeminded Milwaukee musicians. Since then, he’s helped organized the Wired Explorations series of live performances at X-Ray Arcade and released his own music under the Wavefiler monicker. Wavefiler’s latest, “Inlets,” is streaming on digital platforms via Las Vegas-based underground electronic label Mystery Circles.

On Wavefiler’s cassette album Farads, the music is a river of electronic sounds, the piping of synthesizers and synthesized woodwinds in reverberant cycles. It was recorded over several years on tape machines and resulted in a sonic collage. Farad is an electronic term, a measurement for the capacity of a component. “The capacitors used in electronic devices charge and discharge and give and take,” Zydek explains. For him, it’s a metaphor “of our human capacity for taking things in and releasing them back into the world.”

“I was attracted to analog tape machines and synthesizers because as I did more digital work, I got lost in a sea of files on the computer,” he continues. “Ironing out ideas got too complicated and became its own form of anxiety. I wanted something more boxed in. There’s something calming, almost hypnotic, watching reels on a tape machine.” And working in that manner gives him a sense of time and structure.

Keep the Shepherd Free

Support Milwaukee's locally owned free weekly magazine.

LEARN MORE

The resulting music is mindful, meditative, and permeated by sense of futuristic nostalgia. Even the artwork accompanying Wavefiler’s releases, by Chicago’s Adrian Johnson, is made with scissors and construction paper—but posted digitally.

Wavefiler will be part of an ambient performance also featuring Reign of Ferns, Lorna Dune and Mahlmeister / Schoenecker, 7-10 p.m. Saturday, Aug. 9 at Anodyne Coffee, 224 W. Bruce St. Integral to the experience will be the visuals projected on screen behind the musicians by Gordon’s Wire Works. The Milwaukee multi-media artist conjures morphic geometric, psychedelic patterns based on the beats and pulses of the music being produced on stage. The audience at past Wired performances, Zydek says, “has been very inclusive with young people as well as people in their 80s making interesting references to the ‘60s.”