Hello,
I have been navigating some challenging waters since the eclipse—after I performed live I felt incredibly drained emotionally… I had also found myself recording for long stretches of time and making leaps and bounds of progress after a long period of feeling stuck and futile… all this release has me feeling emptied out.
The good thing is that I am much better at coping with periods of drought than I was before, I have more tools under my belt and I am more forgiving of myself when I feel uninspired, and I have come to enjoy the feeling of the void— because it calls out to be filled, which leads me to seek and seek!
What am I seeking currently? New sounds—I am listening to a lot of strange and unfamiliar music. I will share some finds from my digs later… I am spending hours browsing rateyourmusic, which is a goldmine for weird shit and I feel like a kid in a candy store discovering esoteric and experimental records, the weirder the better. The process of digging is quite enchanting and life giving.
I am tentatively returning to practice which looks like being surrounded by pedals and my synth on the floor, looping vocals and recording into my trusty 4-track tape machine, howling glossalias into the night by dim candle light. It feels very intimate and rewarding, and I am not sure if these nightly purges will ever see the light of day or reach any ears, but they are restorative and activating all at once.
I do feel a schism, a divide, and I am not sure how real that is—between the states of raw creation, where I feel like an animal howling into the night, or like some unknown entity is reaching into me and through me—and my egoic / human animal need to be understood, which manifests as wanting to create things that fit more into a structure or a narrative. Anything that I make that I intend to release, whether I like it or not, has to go through this loop—and, much like a tape loop, it creates a sort of disintegration or entropy where the initial spark or chaos has to be made into a form, and the journey of that is a sort of tragedy.
Journeying through that dark tunnel creates a lot of tension for me, so much so that at times I feel extreme amounts of tension in my body and anxiety as soon as I hit record, or when I have to perform — I feel the strain and it becomes a sort of knot in my hose, I struggle to vocalize fully, my playing becomes clunky. It’s something I have a lot of shame about, but now I am simply noting it and seeing what adjustments can be made. Currently I can only feel safe making music in the dark, which has its own challenges (I can’t see shit lol), but I am honoring that with my candle-lit jams. I feel myself able to unravel in the darkness, I enter the alchemical portal of release.
I am trying to dig deeper into what the tension is about too, and I think it’s about feeling like there is a right or a wrong to these things, a binary. The expectation that there is a correct way to perform immediately contracts me. When I write a song, I want to do it justice and I fear if I don’t, that I am a mistake because I faltered. I just wonder: does it all have to be so heavy? Maybe that’s why I am dipping a toe into noise stuff, since there’s truly no wrong way to do it. It’s a very healing ethos.
I am not sure what the right answer to these things. All I have is questions, and the opening they are carving out. I’m hoping asking is more like a seed than a fruitless husk.
-A
Here’s some finds from my digs:
hypnotic, spiraling turntabilism
haunted occult sounds
ritual in a hidden cave