The Murder Gal At The Courthouse: Criminal Investigator Proximal/Distal Moonlights As A Brilliant Techno Producer
by Dave Segal
“Drexciya changed my life, changed how I viewed music and my relationship to electronic music—how complex it could be while still being distilled to an essence. It's perfect,” says Jennifer Trezza, aka techno/ambient producer Proximal/Distal in a Zoom interview that took place in August 2025, shortly before her move from Chicago to Seattle.
“I have this super-cringe photo of me, probably taken in 2002, playing some goofy-ass, non-attended show in Atlanta."
In Atlanta in 2002, techno and electro was not a thing. It was all horrible indie rock and handbag house. But there was a tiny group of us into techno and electro, and there's an embarrassing photo of my doing a live show in a boiler suit and ski mask. I stanned those dudes so hard.” Trezza laughs, but the picture she paints of her youthful enthusiasm for the legendary Detroit group is utterly endearing.
If you don't know who Proximal/Distal is, it's understandable. Yes, she has a loaded SoundCloud page, but no official releases, save for tracks on the compilations Basement State & Friends and Sonic Adventurers Consortium Vol. 2 and a remix of Conner Jones' “BruteFarce.” Two Proximal/Distal live performances have been uploaded to YouTube (including her ripping 2019 set at Seattle's Velocity Fest) and she's played live and DJed a bunch with Portland IDM crew Tarantella and at Detroit's Temple Bar. This ostensible lack of productivity is deceptive, though.
Proximal/Distal's low profile stems from a hatred of self-promotion and, as she admits, “I'm really terrible at finishing things. I probably have like 1,500 half-finished songs on my computer, and so many jams. I dunno... once the idea is out, I'm done with it. I wanna do something else. I'm really bad at the follow-through. Which is okay. You can make stuff just because you like the process of making it.”
Another factor hindering Proximal/Distal's music career is the fact that she's moved a lot. Among other places, she's lived in Portland, Seattle, Detroit, London, and Chicago. “Every time you move, you have to tear down and reset everything up. It takes four or five months before everything gets unpacked and you haven't been working and you're miserable. You lose it and you gotta get it back.”
Trezza's day job as a licensed criminal defense investigator is, to understate things, unusual for a musician. She had been working for the Cook County Public Defenders office in Chicago and will take a similar post in King County/Seattle in September. “There's crime everywhere. If you do what I do, you can do the job in any state. My job is really second-hand traumatic. I'm the murder gal at the courthouse I'm assigned to. I work on all the homicides that come through. It's gory work. It's a violent world out there. A lot of my clients have really sad stories, like neglect, poverty, and injustice. It's hard to get that off you at the end of the day.
“I don't like to make art about it, because I just want to separate myself. So I always say that I make music as a response to it. I come home and I want to unwind, so I want something that reminds me that there's beauty in the world, there's art. It's not just people killing each other.”
For Trezza, making music is definitely an escape valve. “I would explode if I didn't do it,” she says, laughing. “I would fucking die. There's really no point in anything else. I derive some satisfaction from my job. It's an important job that matters. I have a lovely dog whom I love. I have wonderful friends and family. But everybody has to have that thing that's the point of their existence. I love music so much. If I don't have time to express myself in that way and I don't have time to noodle and play, I get horrifically depressed. So I have to do it.”
Trezza started making her own music in 2001 after moving back from London, where she'd bought her first synthesizer. “It was this big digital Oberheim that they put out—a big blue keyboard. I think it might have been the OB-12. I remember the hassle of getting it shipped home with me when I brought it back stateside. It was, yeah, I'm gonna learn how to sequence this thing and make music with it.”
Trezza's formative years occurred in the '90s, and her enthusiasm for music accelerated when a friend turned her on to industrial music at a young age. Soon after, she got into punk and then rave music. “Then this goofy thing happened called electroclash. It was so simplistic that I realized, hey, I can do this. You listen to the first Peaches record [The Teaches Of Peaches] and think, hey, that's something I could do. It was a gateway drug to Drexciya and the whole Detroit techno sound. That's really my first love and favorite music. I feel fortunate to have gotten to live in Detroit and get to be in the Motherland.”
Even as an outsider, Trezza was able to slot into the Detroit music scene while she was there, but she does admit that it was “really intimidating, because literally everybody is talented. You go to any bar and there's some nobody kid DJ coming up already club-grade... It's just a musical town and there's so much of it. But people are so nice and accepting. I recently DJed Body Worx at Temple Bar, my friend Dretraxx's night. He's an amazing musician and DJ. There are so many opportunities to play live or DJ. I don't think you're gonna do better in the US, as far as inspiration and the legacy of electronic music. It's still happening all the time, even though people say it's over; it is not.”
You can hear the Detroit techno influence on Proximal/Distal's recordings and live performances, but elements of dark and hard European artists such as Surgeon, Oliver Ho, and Autechre also surface. Then there's “Infinite Raccoon Lives,” a glassily psychedelic, chill techno cut from the Basement State & Friends comp and P/D's peak, “E-girl”—hard-driving, bleepy, and clattering techno with an eerie melody in the background. The 2019 track “Colfax, 4 a.m.” and a 2021 hardware/modular live set from 2021 prove that P/D can excel at melodically advanced techno, as well.
The name of Trezza's newest project, Desdemona Club, was inspired by a dive bar in a Twin Peaks-y area of Oregon, near Astoria. “I got tired of writing techno for a little while and I wanted to do something that was less 4 on the floor, less structured in that sense. [Desdemona Club] is more ambient and experimental. I released one of those tracks on the Tarantella compilation Audioglyphs [find it on Bandcamp].” Tarantella is both a Portland IDM crew and label headed by Sean Millican. Trezza's also done some DJ mixes for the imprint that reflect her excellent taste in weird ambient music.
I wonder if Trezza creates music with a utilitarian goal in mind—like, say, for club DJs or for potential licensing in films? “I don't. I don't even try to anymore. Trying to create for very specific scenarios has been a contributing factor in why I find it hard to finish stuff. Not only am I done with the idea, but then I've got this idea that I'm trying to force into a format.
“I DJ, too, and it's easier to mix in songs that are structured a certain way, right? And, man, I just don't want to write that. [laughs] Sometimes I don't wanna have to stick a drumbeat stem intro on the beginning of stuff. I find it mentally anxiety-making. I don't make myself do that anymore. The beauty of divorcing yourself from the idea that you're going to have some sort of musical career, there's gonna be some expectation for releases, that I can just write whatever I want to.”
Trezza became fascinated with Madrona Labs products after reading an interview with Rrose (aka Seth Horvitz, aka Sutekh, who used to record for Madrona Labs founder Randy Jones' Orac label) in which they said they used ML plug-ins. “I thought, 'woah, what is this? These are fucking cool.' There's some weird, organic VS key plug-in. I love Kaivo. I've probably used Kaivo on everything. It's so organic; it's beautiful. So, that's how I first found out about it.
“Then I played Velocity Fest in Seattle and, oh my god, here's the Madrona Labs guy who made the plug-in I love so much! I fangirled pretty hard. I've come back to them recently, because I'm moving cross country to Seattle, and I knew this was coming for months, I've been packing up my studio. So, I've not been using a lot of my hardware and I've been working a lot in the box. I'm playing a show in Seattle with some friends right when I get there [August 29 at Mountain Bar], and I can't bring a bunch of shit with me. So I was going to use a laptop with a weird MIDI controller setup. I think Kaivo will figure very heavily in the set. There's nothing better, in the box, for weird, dynamic percussive sounds.”
Besides Kaivo, Trezza's Madrona Labs arsenal includes Sumu. She views it as “a way to reuse sounds that I'm either sick of or haven't been able to quite get where I want to. Maybe I can make a partial out of them and give some life to them that they didn't have before.”
As for Trezza's musical agenda for the near future, she says, “I have some songs that are dangerously close to being completed, so I would like to finish them. I have a monthly night in Chicago that I do with some pals... I don't want to call it a goth night, but it's not a techno night. We're just weird freaks who like Throbbing Gristle. [laughs] It's really fun. I'm going to miss it. I want to find someplace where I can DJ at regularly [in Seattle]. It's so nice just to show up with a USB stick and not have to bring half your studio with you.”
This is Clementine.
Desdesmona Club plays August 29, 2025 at the Mountain Room in Seattle.
I plan to be there!