Album Release :: Ars Apparatus :: Show at Flicker 12/14

My new album, Ars Apparatus, is coming out on Saturday, December 14th on streaming platforms. You can order the cassette tape and the zine on Bandcamp.

I’ll also be playing an album release show at Flicker on Saturday, December 14th with Ariel Ackerly (experimental drone artist) and Acnestis (Ariel Ackerly on synth, Bridget Dooley on bass, Lisa Lipani on harp, and myself on viola). If improvisational meadow music isn’t your thing, I don’t know what to tell you.

My singles “Marlene,” “Aster,” and “Stoat” were released in the last few weeks. Follow the links to stream.

I recorded this album back in February at Zeke Sayer’s studio in Lavonia, Georgia, and I’m thankful to Mat Lewis for help with production and for laying down piano on “Marlene.” “Marlene” was a short story before it was a song, and when it was too unwieldy to sing live, I turned it back into a short story. You can read the first part of the story in my zine.

These songs were written before I could assign to them the meaning I now give them. “Aster” in particular foretold for me the process of transition before I was ready to hold it. In it, the two figures from the tarot, The Star and the The Knight of Cups, represent the binaries that water flows through, between, and past. It's a ballad to the flows and possibilities opened up in language and performance by theory and enactment, possibilities that I have been able to build a community around.

I started using they/them pronouns with people closest to me in the middle of this year, and I spent months wondering if I “deserved” to (all the while acknowledging that I wouldn’t gatekeep a similar request from someone else). The love I’ve received from those closest to me has made it possible for me to start introducing myself with my pronouns in most spaces. I hesitate to assign a premature narrative to my decision that “explains” (and thus forecloses) my reasoning, and so instead, I open myself to the possibility that my request can live as-is and that grace will follow. It often hasn’t. I am thankful for when it has.

And so with this: I offer gratitude for those who read, and those who listen, and those who support. I hope you enjoy the album.