A Story and Some Thoughts
A short story, some unordered thoughts, and new music
Promo
On July 27th, Boyz II Them will be playing my penultimate residency date at Earthly Delights. Free as always from 9pm - 2am.
I have some new music under an alias, kind of. (G) is an approximation of the name my parents would have given me if I was Assigned Female at Birth. I began to address this with my work on T4T Luv NRG with the album Call Me G. Lately, my AMAB birth name has been feeling like a home that I haven’t moved out of yet. There are still boxes to tape up and junk drawers to empty. I’m sleeping on a bare mattress, surrounded by piles of belongings that amount to a life in process. I have no where to go yet, so for now I’ll sleep.
A name change, mandates a set of social reorientations that I currently lack the capacity for. My birth name is very feminine, it is very black, and it is very gay. My first name was given to me as a means of honoring the ancestral femininity that is my inheritance. Or at least that’s what I tell myself about how my parents made their decision to call me Russell when I came out the way I did. Russell is my grandmother’s maiden name. Her name is Georgine. Ellington comes from Duke Ellington and Langston comes from Langston Hughes, two light complexion black artists that were rumored to have non-normative sexualities.
(G) isn’t so much a change, as it as an addition, or rather, an acknowledgement of something that was buried deep inside a memory that is someone else’s. I haven’t asked my friends who have transitioned what their name’s amount to and how they came to them. I don’t know how to. Maybe I’ll try, maybe that will help me. Maybe they’re waiting for me to ask.
I suppose this is a kind of coming out. Coming out, multiple times, is exhausting. I feel like I’m always coming out or I’m being strategic about how to manage my current gender expression. My transition taking a more decisive turn into the feminine, has been a series of forays and retractions out of and into the closet. When I feel safe within the confines of the life that I have built, I foray, out into the wilderness. Sometimes, I can spend days foraging and return home a new woman, drenched in new scents, touting shiny baubles, and pretty clothes. When I go to work, apply for jobs, or go to the dentist, then I retract, back into my cool, dark box, clutching my small collections until the moment passes and I can come out to eat and forage again. There will be a time when I’m all the way outside. I don’t know when that will be. For now I do what I can and what I must to stay safe and stay connected to that essence, that approximation. The whisper of a name.
(G), my life as a woman.
The “new” music that I am presenting is a collection of documentations of a process that I first undertook when recording Call Me G. Call Me G is still facing the DJ world, so there is an emphasis on “functional”, recognizable rhythms that fit within a beat-matched format of music presentation. I wanted to take the iterative process that I began with Call Me G and stretch it into a new mode, challenging myself to listen more intently and to collaborate more effectively with the machines that allow me to execute an iterative process with ease. I decided to further explore the application of this process by using granular samplers, in this case the Make Noise Morphagene and the Instruo Arbhar. I am interested in utilizing recordings as materials for composition. The samples that I have accumulated through composing and recording can be exploited as new materials and I can make new compositions and therefore even more new materials from this process.
I am eternally grateful to the work of Edward George, Lloyd “Bullwackie” Barnes, King Tubby, The Revolutionaries, Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe, bookworms, Mark Fell, false aralia, Ulla, Jan Jelinek and many others for inspiring me to apply the processes of iteration.
This work is made by making a short loop on a synthesizer or selecting a field recording from my phone, recording it into one of the samplers (for my purposes, the Morphagene privileges percussive playback, while the Arbhar I find more useful for textures, multitimbral sounds like chords, and wonky stereo information), and modulating parameters on the samplers until I find something that I think is pleasant, then I record the performance into a DAW. I used Ableton for the project.
These pieces are rhythmic, but I refer to them as ambient. They have a great deal of spatial information that infers interior and exterior spaces. With this project, I explored creating process oriented works that don’t possess the typical narrative trappings that I have presented in the past. I did this for practical reasons. Sometimes I want these works to be out there for you to listen to as soon as possible. This means that I make compromises. This time, I did not prioritize finding a poetic name or theme that unites these works outside of the process that I used to make them. I also wanted to practice accepting that not all works can be easily self-defined. Some works require presentation and performance in a cultural environment in order to be completely activated. A feedback loop is created when I experience a social response from my presentations and integrate these responses into my next performance. This process is also demonstrated by my racial, cultural, and gender expressions.
When I refer to myself as a woman, I am sharing a personal truth that requires no external validation. This truth is material, even if you can’t see it yet. I have executed a process that led me to this truth. I exist as a woman because I have spoken it into existence. However, when entering the outside world, I am charged with re-synthesizing my presentation, in order for you to recognize me and refer to me as a woman. It is much easier for you to refer to me as a woman if I have no inference of facial hair, if I wear a flattering dress, if I wear make-up, and braid long strands into my natural hair. I am more a woman to you if I dawn new clothes, scents, hair styles, and vocal affects for you to read my truth as such and not to misinterpret my presentation as deception. We all possess biases that lead us to presume gender based off of how we have internalized how gender is performed. We are all in different periods of re-orienting these biases. This perspective approximates how this experience demonstrates the reconciliation of myself as a trans woman within the culturally specific confines that I inhabit. This means of expression is an approximation of the practices I am expected to adhere to in order to be recognized as a woman. As I’ve already implied, this process doesn’t entirely account for the temporal specificity of the experience of being on the job or being at home with my loved ones. The closet and the outside world dialectic. I remain un-reconciled. I am split. I am whole within my self-denial. I am incomplete within my capitulation.
Sometimes artists ask me, “How do you know when a song is finished?” and I reply “When you say that it is.” I remain un-reconciled until I say that I am reconciled.
What follows is a short story. A piece of autofiction. This is me, writing myself into being. I’ve found that it has been easier for me to accept this version of myself if I externalize her. She isn’t me, but I think she at least smells the same.
She walked and walked before lifting up her arm to press the outer edge of her palm into each eye to wipe away the sunscreen. G thought that she was squinting because the sun was beaming down on her so intensely, pushing its light through the leaves of the tall trees surrounding her. She’d applied the sunscreen so long before her walk in the forest, that she had forgotten about it. Half a mile back, she poured some water from her reused water bottle into her hand and splashed it in her face. It was refreshing at first. That day was hotter than she had expected, so she was glad that she had packed the bottle in her purse along with her wallet (empty), lighter (with nothing to smoke), journal (with no pen), and small change left from the ear plugs that she bought the night before (no earplugs). She picked up this purse from the hook by the door, adding what she needed as she left her house, forgetting what else it contained. The purse perched on her shoulder following her along the path as she continued to walk.
The water saved her from the heat. Moments later it betrayed her as the stinging in her eyes grew.
G stretched her eyes open over and over, blinking profusely after she wiped away the sunscreen with the blended fabric of her dress. She could see without squinting again. She took two deep breaths and felt her face relax, closing her eyes slowly and centering herself before starting to walk again. When she opened her eyes, she saw a small bird. She approximated the distance to be 10 feet away, but she could never get the imperial system quite right. The bird had a black, shiny, pointed beak that blended seamlessly into his head, hiding tiny beaded eyes that were lost in his long face. This black streak was interrupted above and below by white strips, framing his face and his yellow breast. The brown of his back signaled to G that this was a kiskadee. She realized she’d been hearing him and his family call throughout the forest. She wasn’t listening for the bird’s song because she took these walks to surround herself with thought. She hadn’t heard this song in so long, that she had forgotten that it lived in her body.
G took half a step and tightened her muscles, catching herself before, her foot slipped on a root that she hadn’t seen while taking her break. This made a scratchy, rough, sliding noise that startled the bird. He lifted off quickly. G tried to follow his path, but lost sight of him.
“Huh,” she mumbled.
“I didn’t know they could live out here,” she thought.
G picked up her feet, moving them forward without picking a direction. She returned to her thoughts, unsure of where she left off.
“What am I going to do?” the sound of her voice scraped low across the leaves and twigs beneath her. Her breath would grow shallow when the thoughts had piled up like tall columns of sheets of paper stacked on old office chairs. “Fuck it,” she grumbled, exhaling forcefully, blowing all of these columns to the ground. She stopped again, closed her eyes and started to breathe in. The breath was so shallow at first. She stopped, holding a breath in. She took her right hand and placed it on her belly, she lifted her left hand and placed it just above and between her breasts. She forced the breath she had been holding, out. She breathed out until it felt like her chest was so empty, that her lungs had disappeared. There was a moment where everything froze. She stood somewhere in the between space at the juncture of the infinite moment when an exhale becomes an inhale. G felt the exhilarating wholeness that comes from the distress one experiences when under extreme physical duress. All methods of discerning the passage of time were obliterated and consciousness was violently torn from the world inside, becoming a complete and total body. Her presence that was absolute.
G’s lungs reappeared as she inhaled. She slowly opened her eyes and the forest began to come back into focus as the bright light of the sun cleared from her vision. There, right there on a downed branch, framed by the baby twigs of a shrub, sat the kiskadee. She stood and feeling her breath return to its natural rhythm, she exhaled in thanks. G continued to walk.
I love stories. I love to tell them. I love to write them. I love to read them. I love to listen to them. I love to recount them. I am documenting my life experiences as I am involved in them. I catalog these experiences into my memory and find creative ways to communicate them. I don’t surveil and report from the corner of a room, not engaging as a means of claiming a future fantastical objectivity. I am in it, in the center, by the wall, in the kitchen, on the couch, underneath the coffee table, stretching my hands to feel the tendrils of your carpet as you submerge me in your story. The story of your day. The story of your life. I try to listen intently. I may get a little excited some times and push to interrupt your sentence as my mind explodes with a new thought or offering. In the past, this was my means of taking an opportunity to impress you, so that you might bring me closer and sooth me, but that left no space for you and our relationship. But now, I apologize profusely, now, I am present, so I keep my segue short or put my thought on hold, so that I might hear you, validate you, offer you the care and consideration that you deserve. We don’t have to be friends for me to respect you in this way, though it might lead to some form of camaraderie.
That is where my storying begins, with you, with us, our interaction and my unreliable narration of our exchange.
Subjectivity, the shifting plates of the ground beneath us, to settle until they’re disturbed by a new idea.
Putting off listening
Putting off listening is demonstrative of my tightly wound insecurities. If I'm not listening then I'm afraid. I'm afraid to open myself up to how the content of what I hear will change me. I'm afraid of being exposed. I'm afraid of being pushed into a corner so that all can point and laugh at my fraudulence. I'm afraid of growing strong. Each new song, is a revelation for an untapped muscle beckoned into awakening. Hearing good music fills me with joy, comfort, and sorrow. Sorrow because I am reminded of the hollowness that my insecurities will leave when my fear is tossed into the gentle breeze, sweeping its way down the sidewalk and into the gutter. Sorrow because I must confront the truth. The truth that my insecurities are not the primary determinate of my personality. When people see me, when we speak, when we hold each other, they do not see me as my fear. Yet I am still afraid to let go of this ancient grievance because who am I without it? Listening and composing from that process of listening, forces me to confront my total being and to accept my precious insecurities. I keep them like I would a locket of fine hairs tied together into a ball that I wear around my neck, tucked between my breasts. I can keep this pendant, but eventually it must go into the junk drawer where it can remind me of this piece of myself, but only when I'm rummaging around for something more useful.