motel void

MOTEL VOID: Could you introduce your project in a few sentences? I haven’t found much information about you on the internet to be honest…

WHEEL KID: Wheel Kid is an experimental folk/noise project, part of Portsmouth, NH, USA’s Sedan Is Real Collective. I’m interested in minimalist folk compositions, field recordings, archival recordings and the kinds of little scraps of sound that we normally don’t think too much about.

MOTEL VOID: You’ve just released your debut single/EP ‘burning sister taylor river’. Is ‘wheel kid’ your first music project?

WHEEL KID: Wheel Kid is my solo project, an offshoot of my main group Bird Friend. Bird Friend is a really collaborative group; over the years we’ve worked with other musicians, artists and poets and lately there’s been a big focus on live performance. Wheel Kid started as a space for me to work out compositions that couldn’t be replicated in a live performance setting, or even by a group of musicians. The idea is to capture these little fragments of sound – musical or otherwise – and weave them into something more delicate or ephemeral.

MOTEL VOID: Could you tell us more about the recording and writing process of your songs?

WHEEL KID: I think that songs exist sort of independently of the artist. Songs are always out there, and the songwriter’s job is to be receptive to them. A song will usually arrive to me more or less fully formed, and I’ve found that if I go out of my way to develop them they sort of fall apart – if I can’t work through a song on the first attempt, I let it go and sometimes I’ll recycle some of the lyrics when they’re “ready.”

As far as recording goes, I keep things pretty simple. I have a little digital 8-track that I use for most of the tracking, and I’m always making little voice recordings of natural sounds I find interesting. “burning sister taylor river” has recordings of the old Orange Line trains from Boston’s subway system, and of insects out in my neighborhood.

MOTEL VOID: Your biggest inspirations right now?

WHEEL KID: The musicologist Alan Lomax is probably my biggest influence; his work recording, preserving, and promoting 20th century folk songs is one of the pillars of modern music culture. Besides that, some Wheel Kid inspirations have been Henry Flynt’s “You Are My Everlovin’/Celestial Power,” Third Ear Band’s “Elements,” and pretty much anything Bedhead ever did.

MOTEL VOID: Your plans for 2024?

WHEEL KID: I make music in a really poetry-oriented scene, so I’m also always taking cues from local poets, who approach writing from a totally different angle than songwriters.

I want to put out a few more small releases; I’m gravitating towards the idea of an ambient EP full of old folk melodies, but I have a whole bunch of my own songs that I’d like to put out there as well. My main group, Bird Friend, is also looking forward to an album release and tour in a few months.