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Salvo Beta, the project of Portland electronic musician Sean Wolfe, just put out its first new music in nearly 25 years. And in order to make it, Wolfe had to learn to hear music in a totally new way.
His two remixes of the Chicago band Still Machines’ song “Echoes Within” are directly inspired by his experience with a cochlear implant, or CI—a surgically implanted prosthesis he received in 2024 after losing most of the hearing in his right ear.
“There’s basically a wire with a bunch of electrodes, and each electrode only triggers a certain frequency band,” Wolfe explains. “The in-between sounds are kind of weird.”
In order to achieve the desired effect on the remix, Wolfe manipulated a Moog synth sound through spectral shaping, a production technique that allows producers to alter individual frequencies. The result sounds something like a bell pinging underwater; the post-punk source material is clear, but the music sounds waterlogged.
“One of the things that really kind of shaped how I started making the music is inferring how frequencies can be shifted and perceived by someone like me, who has one of these CIs,” he says.
The two remixes will appear on Still Machines’ remix album Echoes of Echoes Within, which releases this Friday on Someoddpilot Records.
Wolfe also has a Salvo Beta full-length slated for release later this year—his first since his 2001 debut, Abrasive Stuttering, and its accompanying 2002 remix album, Evil Against Evil.
Though most of the new album was recorded before Wolfe received his cochlear implant, he is intrigued by the possibilities of recording music for people who’ve undergone similar experiences.
“I know that there’s some challenges because each person’s experiences would be different depending on their placement and the brand of CI that they have,” Wolfe says. “But it would be an interesting endeavor to try and do.”
Born and raised in the Chicago suburbs, Wolfe started making electronic music in the early- to mid-1990s with the crude software he had available at the time.
“I started making music on my PC using a program called Modedit,” he says. “It looks almost like a spreadsheet, where you put in little numbers and it triggers samples. It was really primitive stuff. And so I grew to eventually get a four-track and a synthesizer.”
Wolfe eventually moved into the city during a fertile time for the Chicago music scene and formed Is You Is, a post-rock band “in the vein of Tortoise and what everybody else was doing at that time in the late ’90s, early 2000s.”
But as he began accumulating more gear, the scorching electronic music he was making under the Salvo B moniker—which eventually became Salvo Beta—began occupying more of his mind.
Inspired by the industrial music released on the Chicago label Wax Trax! along with U.K. electronic music mavericks like Autechre and even hard-rock bands like Queens of the Stone Age, Abrasive Stuttering is harsher and more serrated than much of the Y2K-era music often termed as IDM, or “intelligent dance music.”
It’s a fine example of the creativity that was going on in electronic music in the early years of the new millennium, but even hardcore music nerds can forgive themselves for not having heard of it.
“I didn’t have the energy or the time to tour or promote the record; there was no real interest in anybody wanting to release it,” Wolfe says. “So that kind of just all got put on the back burner.”
Wolfe sold much of his gear in 2007, putting music aside to focus on his career as a software engineer. He moved to Portland in 2015 for a gig with Discogs, the Beaverton-based online music database invaluable to both music journalists and record nerds.
“I was only there for about a year and a half; it didn’t really work out,” he says. “I’ve been here just eventually trying to figure out the scene.”
Wolfe began noticing hearing loss in his right ear in 2020, during the pandemic. When doctors examined his ear, they found an acoustic neuroma, a noncancerous tumor affecting the nerve leading from the inner ear to the brain.
As it turned out, his label boss Chris Eichenseer had also been affected by an acoustic neuroma in the past—a remarkable coincidence given the infrequency of the condition, which, according to Wolfe, the average audiologist will encounter three times during their entire career.
“I had an audiogram done, and when I went to Chicago and visited Chris, he looked at the audiogram and he said, ‘This asymmetry, the loss in the right ear looks almost exactly like mine, so when you get back to Portland, you should get an MRI.’ And I did,” Wolfe says.
After learning that removing the tumor would destroy what was left of his hearing in that ear, Wolfe opted for the implant. Relearning how to hear through a cochlear implant is a difficult and intensive process, but he’s never felt more driven to make music.
“I’m fully in it, and I want to keep going,” Wolfe says. “I want to keep going as long as I can.”
CHECK IT OUT: Still Machine’s Echoes of Echoes Within, featuring remixes by Salvo Beta, will be available to stream April 24 on digital streaming platforms and on Bandcamp
