KENOSHA — There's a special sound coming from Kenosha that you've probably never heard. That's because it's an instrument played by only one person in the world.
“It resonates with something inside me," Wilhelm Matthies said.
The instrument is called a Mosesa. It's a bit like a smaller and skinnier cello that is played horizontally. No one else plays it because the instrument was invented by Matthies inside his Kenosha home. He's a musician, artist, creator, and inventor.
"Before I made these, I remember once I was sitting there I said I could hear the sounds years before I literally could make it."
He has built roughly 15 different versions of the Mosesa. It started as just some string, wood, and plastic, but it has turned into something more complex.
For more than a decade, the retired elementary school art teacher has been expressing, exploring, and experimenting with bowed instruments.
“Find something that you find resonates with you, and you keep finding what’s going to be the best way for this resonance to come out clearly for others," he said.
For Matthies, it’s creating and playing abstract instruments.
"When you create your own instrument, it creates a new relationship on how you can make sounds."
Ever since he was a college student decades ago at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champagne, he has been experimenting with homemade instruments. He made his own percussion instruments with rods, beads, jugs, sticks and anything else he could make a beat out of. Then just after 2010, he started to build his own string instruments. He has the Mosesa and the newer Maateesaa.
“Anything that you can pick up that will create a sound that you can use to communicate with someone else I call that an instrument.”
To go with his unconventional instruments, his style of play is equally abstract. He calls his genre - improvisation. There is no consistent beat, melody, or rhythm. Instead, he focuses on his emotion. He plays louder and softer as he loses himself in the music.
“When you play music you’re present, especially when it's improvised. You're present to the moment of when you’re playing.”
Given the nature of his improvised sound, many of his songs aren’t repeatable. If he does write notes down, it’s not with typical sheet music either. He calls it graphic composition. It's a series of lines. If the line goes down that means drop the pitch. If it goes up, make a higher pitch. If the lines get thicker, play louder.
After all, art has no rules or conventions. It’s whatever feels good to you. That’s why Wilhelm likes to make his own instruments and play to his own tune.
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