...

A drawing of a cell with a bed strapped to the wall, a staff full of music written in the wall, and a cell window with a shooting star in the distance

    The events of the past three months delayed this essay substantially, but I won’t get into it here. It felt strange devoting time to an album of the year essay. My sore, burning throat telling me I’d forgotten something important. Ignoring the bitterness on my tongue, I spent December listening through music from this past year. Maybe I hoped I would find something in it, maybe it was an escape from an inevitable future full of fascism, environmental collapse, economic disaster and murder. Maybe it wasn’t that complex; my change-phobic brain wouldn’t let me skip this ritual. I almost chose to put out a simple list and instead devote my energy to hunkering down. As December turned to January turned to February, I considered dropping it entirely. A twinge of something unnameable wouldn’t let me. I put on the final album that I had been meaning to sit with.

    In January of 1944, the Nazis established Frøslev prison camp in Southern Jutland, Denmark. Some twelve thousand Danish political prisoners, communists and resistance fighters were imprisoned there. Hundreds would die in those walls and over a thousand would be transported to the horrors of the concentration camps in Germany. Of those taken by the Gestapo, one woman spent her first night in captivity carving something into the wall of her cell. She had been captured on suspicion of collaborating with the Danish Anti-Fascist Movement. She had been making and transporting explosives meant to destroy the Nazi’s communication lines. If this had been discovered, she would have been executed. By luck, her bravery was kept secret. Instead, she was taken to Frøslev. On her first night in captivity, she saw a star flash though her cell window. Using her belt buckle, she began to carve into the nearby wall. First, she etched a staff, then a clef and finally notes. A melody that would ultimately become the song "Du og jeg og stjernerne" (You and I and the Stars). Her name was Else Marie Pade.

    Seven decades later, in a record store in Houston, I thumbed through the CDs in a section labeled “Weird and Experimental.” Among the power electronics “sarcastically” appropriating fascist imagery, Brian Eno knock-offs, and John Cage staples, I found a simple black CD with the picture of a woman smiling and looking downwards next to the words “Else Marie Pade | Electronic Works 1958 – 1995”. I bought it, sound unheard. Driving down the highway in my old gray pickup, CD at full volume, I was pulled into a spiral of vintage oscillators, sweeping, ethereal white noise and Danish poetry. It stirred something deep inside of me. I started growing out my hair and entertaining the idea of womanhood. The more I learned, the more I fashioned a sense of camaraderie with this stalwart, independent champion of the music I loved in the face of sexism and fascism. I saw myself in her and that didn’t make sense.

    Pade is most famous for her electronic music. Lately, there have been some wonderful efforts to make her entire catalog available, including re-masters of her old music and new interpretations of her chamber and orchestral pieces. In particular, I’d encourage anyone to check out the Orchestral Album released in 2022 and this year’s release of Faust. I knew one of this year’s releases would end up on this list.

    The last one on my checklist this December was Sange fra en væg. I expected her unique flavor of ghostly, angular electronic classical music. Instead, my ears were filled with Danish folk songs and jazz balladry performed by a singer and cellist. Confused, I paused it. Was there another Else Marie Pade? I went looking for an explanation and discovered the earlier story about the concrete wall and the belt buckle. Her storied life as a comrade was something I was already aware of, but I was unaware that, in the inferno of Nazism and survival, this was the music inspired during that time. Strange that an experience so full of horror would illicit music so comfortable and warm. Even stranger that, in the face of that same horror, her first thought was, “I’ll be a composer if I survive.”

    Learning this reminded me of something; an unused neural pathway slowly crackled to life for the first time in ages. Years ago, sitting in a 20th century musicology class, I learned about the U.S.A. Works Progress Administration’s Federal Project Number One; an initiative to employ jobless American musicians and composers. The goal was to create a musical identity for our country. Like most American public art initiatives, they were specifically searching for uplifting music that was suitable for the masses. Composers like Aaron Copeland, Samuel Barber, and Virgil Thomson would prove to be the answer to this search for the American sound. My initial suspicion was that the immediate experience of societal trauma (in their cases, economic collapse and war) led composers to find solace in consonance and familiarity. Stable footing in an unstable world. Pade seemed to react to the horror of the camps with a sense of tonality that would later calcify into dissonance as her imprisonment faded into her past.

    Something about this hypothesis felt shaky, and so I brought it to my dear friend Poe Allphin: a fellow co-conspirator in the pursuit of being as transsexual as possible and guy whose good at asking me difficult, important questions that challenge my assumptions. He pointed me toward the book by Dean Hubbs titled The Queer Composition of America's Sound specifically the chapter “A French Connection,” wherein Hubbs tackles the influence of Copeland, Barber, and Thompson’s homosexuality on their aesthetics.

    Early in his life, a young Samuel Barber would pen a letter to his mom in, as Hubbs puts it, a sort of coming out.

“To begin with, I was not meant to be an athlete. I was meant to be a composer, and will be I’m sure. I'll ask you one more thing — Don’t ask me to try to forget this unpleasant thing and go play football. — Please. Sometimes I’ve been worrying about this so much that it makes me mad (not very).

Love,

Sam Barber II (Notice to Mother and Nobody Else)”

Samuel Barber, like many gay people, likely struggled with his homosexuality from a young age. What do you do when you don’t have the words or bravery yet? There is something eerily familiar about this letter to me, a composer who would later come out as a transsexual. Hubbs then cites musicologist Philip Brett saying, “All musicians are faggots in the parlance of the male locker room…” There is something about being a composer that goes beyond norms of gender and sexuality.

    During this last election, the Republican party poured millions of dollars into anti-trans advertisements. This, paired with the party’s stance against anything that defies traditional social roles, including divorce, women’s empowerment, and homosexuality, is right out of the Nazis’ playbook. I thought about Else Marie Pade staring down a fascist regime that was pushing the same exact propaganda. Her choosing to turn towards extreme acts of resistance. I thought about why she felt that the Nazis stood between her and being a composer.

    Hubbs goes on to discuss the curious infiltration of these gay composers’ music into the mainstream. As she says, there is “a striking paradox here, in the fact that queer artists should have served during this deeply homophobic era in America, as architects of American national identity.” She analyzes the potential reasons for the musical proclivities of these composers. Specifically, pointing to their affinities for French and Russian musical sensibilities. Not because they are “pretty”, but because they were perceived as feminine. Gay American composers would often tie their music back to the famous gay composers of history, like Handel and Tchaikovsky. A lineal faggotry they used to find each other through their music.

    The musical approaches of these composers were not an attempt to craft something that felt American. Instead, queers have always been good at imbuing their work with the essence of finding one another. We draw heavily from the immaterial feelings in the music that helped us find ourselves, and we use it to echolocate one another; music made from the raw material of finding community. It is unsurprising that such music would transcend its original intent, only to be sanitized by cis-heterosexual copycats for decades to come. This process is no doubt familiar to modern queers that face the co-opting of kitsch and the metallic sound design of Sophie by popular cis-heterosexual media.

    Around the time that I began transitioning, the music that populated my end-of-the-year roundups changed. Before, they were full of albums selected because I knew they were supposed to be good, with some pockets of music that scratched the repressed queer itch in my mind. Once I embraced it, I became desperate for that connection. I shifted towards almost exclusively trans and queer music. I was searching for something.

    There is something different about Else Marie Pade’s electronic pieces. They are absolutely thorny and weird in the way my music and I am. Her music never felt as anti-audience as the work of her contemporaries. There is an intangible desire for community embedded in her work that infected me as I sat listening to it in my truck when I was 19. Through Sange fra en væg, I discovered the seed of that same desire for community.

    I craved the connection to something bigger and gayer. It's the dream for a world that got Pade locked in that cell in Frøslev for daring to seek. It's the inspiration for the the American queer composers. It's the hope that Nazis and conservatives stand in opposition to today. It’s the feeling that pulled me out of the closet in my twenties.

    A lineage of gay and trans love shared through our music.

    This essay is an investigation of that feeling. With a newfound understanding of what had been subconsciously driving me, I returned the music I listened to obsessively last year. The essays and music reviews below are an interrogation of what they taught me about the intangible queerness of being a composer.

Music Without Words

    I’ve had a pretty severe writers’ block since 2019. Before that, it wasn’t unusual for me to be building three instruments at the same time while performing in multiple ensembles. The pandemic was a convenient enough excuse, but it actually started when I began transitioning. If I had ceased making music entirely, or if I wasn’t constantly working on other projects instead of music, I would have attributed it to the general anxiety and stress I was feeling to being a trans person. I was stressed beyond belief, but I think there was something else at work.

    Despite my recent attempts to find modern orchestral music or experimental projects that resonated with me, I ended up feeling distant from all of it. In my time as a trans composer, I’ve learned the hard way that the professional classical music world has a huge barrier to entry. While there are a few examples of people breaking through that ceiling, I always struggled with how tonal a lot of it was. Despite my admiration for them as queer composers, I initially did not like the music of Aaron Copeland, Samuel Barber, or Lou Harrison because it wasn’t as weird or angular as I hoped it would be. I wanted to see myself and my musical sensibilities in the queer composers that preceded me.

     So what changed? Living out as a trans woman came at the cost of opportunities to work as a composer. Further, the fear of being early-transition in a transphobic world isolated me in ways I have never been before. It became harder to consider music in the way the great Avant-garde composers I looked up to did; their idea that the ultimate pursuit should be making something too challenging for a modern audience. Like a pre-transition dysphoria beard, I hid behind my incomprehensibility rather than face how sad it was to feel so alien all the time. Despite the trials and tribulations, accepting my transsexuality pushed me to try and be understood.

     In the process of striving to find instrumental and abstract music that still struck a chord, I realized the thing that caused my writer’s block and made me stop listening: fatigue. Fatigue from years of trying to make it work only to end up feeling like an outsider no matter what I do. It is, however, bittersweet because now that I’m out, I’ve had an easier time finding people like me. People whose music affects me in a way that so much of music I was trained on cannot. As hard as it is for all of us, I’m so grateful for the chances that I get to experience music made in spite of it all.

Night of Fire by ---__--____ - Back in college, a colleague joked that, “Train sounds are the C-Major of musique concrete.” How much of that stuff was trendy because Schaeffer and Stockhausen were doing it? How much of it was due to the limitations of the oscillators and what was walking (or a train ride?!?) distance from the recording studio? This album is a dizzying collage of sounds that all deserve a place on my “Trans Girl Sound Conspiracy Board.” Gutteral ASMR screams and whispers compete with auto-tuned vocals over an orchestra of midi instruments and sound design magic. Music made from sounds a trans ride distance away.

pertencente à madeira e ao aram by poliana esperança - On the surface, this album could be mistaken as one of any number of ambient piano projects flooding the study playlists of music streaming platforms. But, there’s an edge to it. The calm, melancholy regularly interrupted by playful dissonance. Sonically, it feels like the experience of working in customer service as a trans person. My calm exterior comes across as, just that, but underneath it’s a suit of armor hiding a never settling panic. This music serene on its face but deeply uncomfortable if you listen too closely. An album the eschews a shared transsexual sound but never-the-less bares its mark.

Julius Eastman Vol. 4: The Holy by Julius Eastman (performed by Wild Up) - Julius Eastman interpretations are bittersweet. I can’t express how much I respect and adore the work Wild Up has done on the now four albums of hard work preserving what we have of his oeuvre. It’s beautiful work, and as a lover of hardcore minimalism and gay composers I feel so lucky that it exists. It’s just sad that it’s all posthumous, built from the scraps of paper and recordings that remain. On “Prelude to the Holy Presence of Joan D’arc”, the constantly repeated lines of “They Said”, “He Said”, “She Said” interspersed with wailing sung lines of “Joan Speak”, personifies what I find so valuable about Eastman’s music. He has this way of using the mechanisms of classical music to trace things in our broken society that are often hidden, especially in our concert halls.

Album Review - Motor Tapes by Sarah Hennies

     Sarah Hennies is another composer that I found by using the same method that guided me to Else Marie Pade. That is, by being compelled to buy a CD I found in the “Weird and Unusual Music” section without any clue of what was on it. In her case, it was the album Gather & Release. I’m sure part of it was the unique use of a an actual needle and thread to keep the case shut. Regardless, what I found was an enormously compelling collection of works for percussion, field recordings of her grandfather, and sine waves. These really stuck with me, and were absolutely a huge inspiration for my field recording work with my instrument, The.

     I continued to follow and be inspired by her work for years after this initial exposure. There are too many examples to count. But, two specific moments stand out. First, was the debut of Contralto for video and ensemble. I was still in the closet at the time, and confronting this masterpiece about trans voice training was eye-opening, to say the least. The second was attending her performance at High Desert Soundings in 2019 and getting the chance to talk with her in person. I remember her telling me that she had grown tired of presenting Contralto, as it was a heavy work about dysphoria. Being early in my transition, I was still too excited and optimistic about having the opportunity to explore my own identity in my music. I remember wondering what it would feel like to be in her position.

     It really didn’t take all that long to get there. I remember sitting in the urgent care getting tested for Covid, only to have a nurse ask if I had gotten the “surgery”. A drop in the bucket of the constant reality of how annoying it is to be publicly trans. At a certain point, it was so exhausting that the idea of bringing that into my music felt like a terrible idea. This grated against how much I still loved art about the transsexual experience. Can you have one without the other?

     It doesn’t always have to be like that. This year, Hennies put out Motor Tapes, an album exploring her return to writing chamber music. In the liner notes she wrote that, “Clock Dies specifically was the first piece where I challenged myself in a practical way to see if I could make ‘normal’ music.” It felt serendipitous, as I simultaneously found myself experimenting with old ways of making music that I left behind when I decided to devote myself to the temple of experimental music.

     I spend a lot of time and energy fretting about communication. I drive myself crazy hoping that people read me correctly, that I make them feel safe, and that I can protect myself from getting hurt in the process. There’s a lot of noise caused by the dissonance between the mechanical plots of my brain and the fleshiness of living with others. This album embraces that. These pieces present human performers with clockwork challenges. The music is a consequence of their inability to perfectly follow the instructions. It’s a celebration of the product that comes form handing over control of your identity to others and trusting that they will try to understand.

     Motor Tapes is an album about music and one composer’s interrogation of her musical trajectory. It’s an album about taking a risk to do something in a different way despite the discomfort. It’s an album about relating to others. It’s simple. We don’t need to constantly live as representatives of our identities or scholars of our own existence. By doing so, this album ended up speaking to my experiences in a much deeper way.

Album Review - Keys & Bells by Erin Demastes

     Erin Demastes is the queen of things. Where other modern composers’ use of found objects rarely goes beyond the novelty of placing a non-instrument on a stage, Demastes’ entire focus is on the object. Her things are carefully selected for their color, sound, shape and drama. Collected together on a stage or the floor of some DIY venue, they convey something larger than what they are. Sonically, her work demonstrates this care, introducing each object slowly and demonstrating the full extent of their capabilities with the pacing and surprise of a stage magician.

     In our text exchanges, I call her objects “the celebrities,” reacting to pictures of “orange wheel” or “blue cone” with star-eyed emojis. They feel alive and a part of her music in a way a violin could only dream. Through playing and positioning her things, Demastes coaxes something anthropomorphic from them. The highly visual element of her practice does make documentation quite challenging. While the absence of the visual is an issue for a lot of recorded experimental music, something as definitively sound-art-y as this requires a careful work around. There’s something particularly potent about seeing a table full of her celebrities that risks getting lost in an album.

     I like the solution Demastes employs on Keys & Bells the best. In these recordings, she pits two groups of her celebrities, objects with piano keys and little bells, against their larger-than-life relatives. In the case of Bells, she carefully introduces and explores each of her little bells within the context of a field recording of a clock tower’s bell. The feeling of the sound of a church bell, this almost mythological sound, being re-contextualized as just a part of this performance of tiny found bells evokes the same feeling for me as watching her play orange hose wheel with the same intensity as she would a grand piano.

     It is very challenging to find an audience for experimental music. A lot of people take it way too seriously or get hung up on tradition. I’ve always been incredibly impressed with how effortlessly Erin Demastes makes the weirdest and noisiest ideas accessible to new audiences. Instead of making her music pretty or tonal, she disarms the listener with absurdity and humor, played completely straight. When listening through Bells the first time, the moment the tower bell rang out, as if it were played by Erin herself, I laughed. All the albums here reminded me that there are methods to fostering and making community, of communicating even with experimental wordless works. But, as far as I’m concerned, Erin Demastes wrote the textbook on it, and it’s on full display on Keys & Bells.

Music from the Bedroom

     Speaking of limitations, I’ve been writing a thing about Wendy Carlos for a few years now. It’s getting closer to done. The research is a little too close to my heart to share in its entirety yet. However, one conclusion I’ve drawn from this project is the following:

When you transition, the world becomes a very small, isolated place. Even spaces and people who aren’t explicitly threatening are difficult due to the strain of constantly worrying about being outed or othered. Is there danger lurking just around the corner? This stress is often absent in our own rooms. Something I’ve noticed about transgender music, is how they are often solo projects with electronics and maybe a small ensemble. Much of it takes the form of producer music, which uses the computer as an instrument to explore the limits of synthesis. We make our music in the places and with the people that make us feel safe, which is a much smaller list than any cis person’s.

     It’s an undoubtedly sad compromise to make. But, it breeds innovation. I believe one reason that Wendy Carlos worked with Bob Moog to create an electronic orchestra was that she ran up against this exact issue. I can’t imagine how much more isolated she felt back then. What do you do as a young trans woman who desires to compose for the orchestra? With the synthesized ensemble, she invented a solution, one that inspired a generation of trans composers. Here are some of the composers from this year that I feel walk in her footsteps:

Album Review - Impossible Light by Uboa

     In 2019, The Origin of my Depression by Uboa became a nonstop listen. I spent the majority of that year in near psychotic levels of depression and suicidality as I navigated the beginning of my transition, abuse, joblessness and denial of my disabilities. As I alluded to in the introduction, this was around the time my listening tastes shifted. Undoubtedly, it was a consequence of my desperate need for help, and my inability to ask people I knew for it. It was too high stakes. I found solace in music.

     I wasn’t just looking for songs. I was looking for music by and for transsexual people. The reality is that my shift in taste wasn’t a declining interest in a type of music, but simple consequence of the types of music that trans people make. We don’t get to write for the orchestra. We don’t get to be uncritically happy or unaware. The gradual realization of the gulf between the blissful ignorance of the cis people around me and myself was stomach churning. I took cover in Uboa’s distinctive screams about her isolation and illness over blistering noise.

     It’s hard to convey the catharsis I felt from the first moments of this years follow up album Impossible Light. Unlike its predecessor, the extreme emotions on this album feel much more active. It’s less the sonic equivalent to weeping in a bed, and instead feels like a soundtrack to all the moments I harness my anger and righteousness to force myself out of mine. Like Impossible Light, I too have experienced my despair coalesce into an inferno of rage, joy and survival in the years since 2019. As she writes on the bandcamp page for this album, “this is a record about the light at the end of the tunnel and the power it takes to keep moving towards it.”

    Surviving is a full-time job. It’s hard to find the light while dealing mistreatment and fear at work, discrimination in public, and lifelong disabilities in the face of an evil healthcare industry that is too concerned with whether or not I still have a dick. In spite of all of this, I have always felt that it is worth it. While I’ll always be furious, I can’t deny that surviving has given me a life a actually enjoy living. I’m glad to see Uboa is still surviving too, and to be reminded that I’m not alone.

Album Review - Ciao Bella by Cali Bellow

     When I saw the album cover for Ciao Bella, the most recent project from Cali Bellow (Leah Levinson) the first thing I thought of was a fan-art series by creator kevins_computer. Back in 2020, he created re-imaginings of various scenes from FromSoftware games as if they had been released on the N64. The doomed cast of each game are depicted as chibi-eque little dolls who cutely pantomime the gruesome moments of FromSoftware’s player character’s lives. The character depicted on this album has a similar look, but the visual comparisons end there. Mostly, I thought of kevins_computer’s renderings because Leah was the person who first showed them to me.

     Even with friends’ music, I try to go in blind. I’m superstitious about expectations and prefer for music to speak for itself. Even so, the image of the chibi Chosen Undead would not leave my mind. I could see them: rendered adorable, cartoonishly sneaking through the low-poly clay Lordran. Being squashed by the Demon Firesage, avoiding traps in Sen’s Fortress, and greeting Solaire. Those images intertwined with the punk, lullaby-esque songwriting I’ve come to expect from Cali Bellow. I finished the album and read the lyrics without the music. They feel so much darker without all the pitch shifted voices and playful instrumentals. Like being reminded of how much I died in Blighttown while looking at kevins_computer’s cute little clay knight.

     There’s another thing Leah sent me once: YOU, DEFEATED by Mia Nie. It’s an essay on transsexuality, grief, and how the author used Dark Souls to cope with it. The thesis is that, during the initial experience of the brutality and mystery of Dark Souls, wandering the world of Lordran feels entirely relatable to navigating ours as trans people. Nervously hiding from strangers while in an unfamiliar place is the territory of both the undead and the trannies. Over the course of the essay, the author’s experience of the game disconnects from her experience of daily life as she gradually masters the interconnected map of Lordran and finds the way to save all the NPCs she loves (as best as Dark Souls allows). Outside of the game, she finds no such luck. I won’t spoil it more than that, but it’s worth a read.

     “An Enclosure” is my favorite track on Ciao Bella, and the moment all of this clicked into place. In it, she reads a text-based rpg style set of prompts. The playful tone of her voice gradually disconnects from the tone of the words. She narrates a story where you find yourself in the wilderness of some fantasy world, run out of food and choose to brave some unknown ruins only to be stabbed and “drift to sleep.” It’s adorable and brutal. In the real world, the flow of tone is distorted. Dark, miserable fantasy epics become comfort media. Your favorite record store starts to freak you out. Sometimes, all you can do is watch the girl that kept at it despite all the times the text “You Died” appeared and think, “cutie.”

Album Review - Baguette by Brigitte Olivares

    Lots of music in the trans bedroom pop subculture obscures or manipulates the voice with electronics and effects. Baguette stands out as a much more bare album, with Brigitte Olivares’ haunting voice standing mostly alone, save for occasional reverb, multi-tracking, or simple piano accompaniment. The simplicity makes it sound much more grounded in reality. The opening track “Ya no quiero ser tu amiga” features a solo a capella voice in a large room. Right at the end the reverb vanishes and her voice appears to move right up to your ears. In that moment it became clear that concert hall I envisioned her singing in was never real. That this recording was made somewhere safe and quiet.

    The placelessness of bedroom pop gives way to fantasy. Sound design, field recordings and electronic instruments allows the musician to vanish from one place and appear in another. Vocal effects allow them to transform. They can become someone they wished they were or something impossible. It’s all very dream-like. Baguette does not make use of many of those tools. Instead, it creates something much more grounded, but no less imaginary.

    It’s easier to entertain fantasies that are impossible. Fantasizing about something more realistic, like being able to comfortably exist in the view of others, requires facing the horrible reality that stands in the way. This album uses sound effects to imagine the singer performing on a stage, with other singers and on a grand piano. But, it is an illusion. Technology allows us to share our voices to a world that would otherwise have us stay quiet. This method of creation allows us to synthesize the concessions we make in our day-to-day lives as trans people into electric fantasies of a kinder world. There is something heartbreaking about a composer having to use an electronic orchestra out of fear. But, it's still beautiful that it helped us carve our names into world.

Album Review - Minotaur by Tex Patrello

     I first saw Tex Patrello at a little DIY space / bar in Dallas. During her short set of voice and piano pieces, I instantly knew I was witnessing something special. We talked after the show, and she mentioned that she was almost done with an album. I think I’d said something about how my last album was done for awhile and then I sat on it and freaked out about the minutia for like 2 years. It felt kind of forward and overly negative of me to say, which I felt more and more when Tex didn’t end up putting anything out for two years. If she did end up fretting about the minutia, it was worth it.

     During a lecture I attended almost a decade ago, musician Julia Holter said, “I like music that sounds like a secret.” She was talking about Robert Ashley’s “Automatic Writing.” It was one of those moments where someone put what I thought was an indescribable feeling into words. Minotaur is music that sounds like a secret. Tex’s mix of whispered and distant falsetto vocals, the crackle of the mix, the sound of the instrumental and vocals being pulled and slowed down like it’s played on a 4track, the ephemeral midi orchestral instruments. It’s an album that I can’t believe exists. Like if I discovered an endangered bug and then lost it before capturing evidence, listening to it made me feel lucky and alone.

     This is a difficult album to write about. So much of the stuff I like about it are wordless. While I could simply say, “it’s weird to listen to an album that has so many of my sonic stims on it,” that doesn’t really describe why it feels like such an important album. There’s a puzzle video game called Bean in Nothingness that I was playing through while listening to Minotaur. In the game, you play as a magic wand wielding girl that can turn beans into monsters that do specific things. This description, while true, completely fails to explain exactly how it feels to solve the puzzles in that game. One night, after solving a particularly brutal room, I tried to explain to my girlfriend how I figured it out. I realized that I had no idea how. All I had was an almost animalistic truth, known without need for words. Listening to Minotaur feels like finding a magical secret puzzle, solving it, and having it disappear before you can tell a soul what happened.”

Music With Others

    When I first started testing my hypothesis on Wendy Carlos, isolation, and technological innovation, I brought it to my friend Julia Boehme. The conversation turned to our different experiences with the artist Anohni, whom we both love but had very different entry points into. For me, her album Hopelessness was a pivotal artistic experience in my transition. The album explores human-caused apocalypse with a sarcastic, bitter tone. Her haunting voice hovers over dense electronic instrumentation in a way that feels inhuman and cruel. The blunt, aggressive attitude of this album is one I’ve been guilty of arming myself with. Julia didn’t see it that way, and said that she felt betrayed by the attitude of Hopelessness, especially as a follow up to the more hopeful, community focused tone of her entry point, I Am a Bird Now. I’m not surprised that we differed in this. For me music was always something I did alone. But, for Julia, especially in her band Starfruit, it’s a communal act.

    In the context of talking about transcending isolation as a trans composer, our different experiences revealed a significant blind spot for me. Music is a place that I put things that are sacred and secret. It’s hard to imagine trusting someone with that. It is reassuring and daunting to learn there’s another way. However rare they are, albums featuring large bands led by a trans person, or comprised solely of trans people, promise that we can not only find community, but use it to create something better than the sum of its parts. It tickles the part of me that once envisioned a future composing operas without fear of the people I’d have to trust with them.

    For a lot of trans people you grow up lonely, distinctly aware of how different you are from everyone else. Through coming out, you realize for the first time that you aren’t alone. The promise that things can be different now keeps you going. But, it isn’t always that easy. It’s hard to unlearn being so thorny. Ensemble music is, at its core, a demonstration of cooperation and mutual vulnerability. So, it’s always hugely impressive to see one of us overcome all of that in its pursuit.

FYM by Azure – This is a technically dizzying, gargantuan rock opera. Through repeated listens and evenings spent deep in its lyrics, I uncovered the lore of a vintage fantasy-tinged world mapped out by a lone scholar desperately searching for the pieces of a mythical sword. It feel uncannily similar to my memory of the fantasy and music I preferred as a kid. Combined with its intricate, classical motivic unity, it’s an album that almost feels tailor-made for me. Azure choosing to create something close to their hearts while sacrificing accessibility struck a chord I hadn’t felt in years.

Tristwch y Fenywod by Tristwch y Fenywod -This album explores magic far closer to their home. The group explores methods of reclaiming their Welsh heritage through song. Learning about the album, I was particularly taken by vocalist and zither player Gwretsien Ferch Lisbeth’s process of turning her experience of learning Welsh as an adult into an album about reclaiming her connection to a culture as a transsexual woman. It’s a feeling that resonated deeply with the often conflicted and distant relationship I have my past as a Texan. Which is why this album, where she and group two other Welsh musicians donned druidic alter egos to sing ballads about a culture that both created and spurned them, feels so instructive.

The Cime Interdisciplinary Music Ensemble by Cime Over the last decade, I’ve spent an enormous amount of time searching for trans composers. The disenfranchisement of trans artists coupled with broken modern search engines doesn't make this process easy. While I certainly don’t dislike the amount of hyper-pop my searches turn up, I’m usually looking for something else. I want to see our tendrils extended into every genre. As I’ve stated previously in this essay, I want to see my noisy, experimental, frenetic self in others. I persist, pouring hours of my time in service of one feeling: “If I had just had THIS album as a kid, who knows...” The Cime Interdisciplinary Music Ensemble, with its vicious, unforgiving mix of noise rock, free jazz, and modern classical composed for big band, with the blistering vocals of Monty Cime hovering above it, is one such album.

Album Review - Honest Hands by Starfruit

    It’s really hard to let yourself be vulnerable with others. I’m getting better, but I used to really suck at it. When I moved to Dallas in 2021, I was in the middle of a New Year’s Resolution: get meaner. I was really tired of getting hurt. It was a misguided attempt to deal with realizing that I wasn’t a super good judge of others intentions. Other than a few long term friends, the only creature I really let myself be honest with was my dog Bilbo. Honest Hands starts with the gentle sounds of a dog panting. I’ve got a similar recording from before my dog Bilbo passed away.

    Julia, the front-woman and driving force of Starfruit, told me she was making an album of ballads. I recall Nebraska by Bruce Springsteen being one of the influences. While recording that album, he initially made a 4-track demo in his bedroom with the intent of having the E-Street band record instrumentals. In the end he found the band’s participation unsatisfactory, and put it out in its original solo form. It’s just so funny to me that even with that album as an influence, Honest Hands ended up being this lush album full of performers, maybe even more than any of her previous albums. Julia can’t help herself but build and participate in community.

    Seeing a trans person leading a band like that is so rare. A lot of us end up lonely, due to how often we get hurt and discarded. Starfruit, as a project, is a testament to the reason Julia defies that. When you listen to the dizzying, incredibly challenging music that her friends threw themselves into at her request, you can sense that love and dedication they gave to it. It’s no wonder why. Her infectious, loving personality passed through my guarded, mad exterior like it wasn’t there to begin with. I have a feeling that the dog panting at the beginning is Bonzo, her big, old dog that passed around the time Bilbo did. I think a lot about the way we supported each other during that shared tragedy. How, we both responded by surrounding ourselves with others. I’m not sure I would’ve been able to do that without everything she taught me. Honest Hands is, like so much of Starfruit’s work, a synthesis of a life spent in vulnerability. Thanks for reminding me how to be a friend.

Music That Disarms You

     The longer I transition, the more fixated I become on this idea of sharing something secret and personal with others. The idea that the desire to be seen as you can surpass any shame or embarrassment over who that you is. In “Art, Furries, God” Patricia Taxxon, transcendent composer, dog, and chick whose video essays on video games I’ve never played keep making me cry, says:

The ‘Furry’ aesthetic, as a whole, is a concession towards the symbolic, the sensory, the ever-so-slightly autistic. When I put furries on my album covers, I am undeniably precluding myself from being taken seriously. But it is this exact tension that I hope serves to communicate my sincerity. I find the aesthetic to be disarming in-and-of-itself, beyond it just being an honest part of me. It is an intentional weapon against the normal defenses that go up when most people are confronted with different or difficult art. That I’m trying to outsmart you, that you are seen as dumb if you don’t applaud it. I just think it’s a little harder to do that when there’s furries on the cover, y’know? I’m disarming myself and hopefully disarming the listener a little bit too.

    This quote immediately preceded her release of the album Agnes & Hilde, my AOTY in 2022. It’s a textbook example of the power of disarming a listener. I highly recommend watching that video and listening to that album.

    Her video’s concluding thesis summed up a long, wordless journey I took throughout the years predating my acceptance of my transsexuality. My acceptance of my not-so-slight autism. My own attempts to disarm myself and the listener by making experimental musical instruments that were intentionally awkward or bizarre. My shift to listening to furry music. It was a multi-year disarmament project that sacrificed the shell of a boy I’d built to survive so I could be the weird chick I was once and would always be going forward.

     The social status of cringe often precludes serious appraisal of subcultures like the furries, therians, or bronies. Most high art or experimental music clings anxiously to serious aesthetics like science or academia, draping itself in collared shirts and droll expressions to convey its importance to culture. A hopeless veneer that begs audiences to take seriously something that is kind of silly. I say this as someone who is very guilty of that same crime. Ultimately, my path through transitioning involved accepting that, in order to be happy, I’d ultimately need to fire the cringe police in my head and embrace the way I don’t fit into a society that has always treated me like a monster anyways.

my twee monsters by tracey brakes - This album explores similar themes of becoming a monster within the milieu of brony music. This aesthetic choice is best embodied by the cover art, a painting of a creature reminiscent of the character Discord, a villainous chimera from the show My Little Pony. The lyrics all center around the sensations of existing in the transience of transforming into something monstrous. The lyrics describe the body parts of an ever-transforming narrator, shifting and morphing like a mirage as she attempts to explain herself to the listener. The whole album marinates in inhumanity through its dizzying electronic instrumentation, auto-tuned and vocaloid voices, and nauseating body horror adjacent lyrics. It embodies the experience of being cast out of the village for the crime of embracing ones cringey monstrosity.

A Lonely Sinner by Samlrc - Samlrc’s lyrics about the despair of cowardice and how unnatural it feels to become a monster in order to survive in a transphobic world are enhanced by the album’s exploration of the singer’s life as a sheep girl. The dense, lo-fi shoegaze instrumentals threaten to submerge the singer as she sings out about how she has to become a wolf. For me, the power of this music to disarm the listener comes from the fact that they used the material experience of being a part of a “cringe” subculture to tell stories about isolation, trauma, and found family. These artists embrace their (supposedly) embarrassing, unavoidable monstrosity in ways that self-serious electronic music outcasts or pop emo bands could only dream of doing.

Album Review - The Medians Ark vs. Last Lull of the Laurel both by Roxy Radclyffe

     Sifting through the hours of music Roxy Radclyffe releases each year fills me with vertigo. When I first discovered her, it actually turned me away. I was far too intimidated to know where to start. As someone who usually takes two years to finish a project at minimum, it churned my stomach. One must imagine her the vessel of a mad god when confronting the sheer volume of output in her discography. As she declares on >>!!irreplAceAble::(<3, “Art is God / God is Art / I am God.”

     Last Lull of the Laurel is not my favorite of the albums released by Roxy this year. That honor goes to The Medians Ark, which is truly a manifesto about the unfulfilled weird potential of hyperpop music. While I do really love The Medians Ark, the only thing I really had to say about it was that it’s fantastic and absolutely lives up to the bandcamp album description essay about the way modern hyperpop had its edges sanded off. While Last Lull of the Laurel is not nearly as digestible, they way it gets caught going down your throat ends up saying something profound.

     Hyperpop in general celebrates its existence as an internet-centric art form. It lacks much of the institutional brick-and-mortar support that mainstream pop gets through radio stations and big labels. Rather than ignoring this, Hyperpop often points to its grassroots origins with songs that heavily reference internet subculture and artists who engage with their audiences in way much more akin to a popular streamer. Despite the internet’s role in this genre, I hesitate to call it a music about the internet. Instead it props up online communities on a pedestal, sanitizing it in a way that feels a lot more like the way 90s films portrayed hacking. The internet of hyperpop is bright, frenetic, and exciting.

     Surfing the web these days has become identical to playing a slot machine. With each refresh of the page, social media platforms churn out an endless ocean of horror with moments of tepid euphoria. Those “wins” are the aesthetic of mass market hyperpop. The losses are Last Lull of the Laurel. It’s like a Sun Kil Moon album if all the lyrics were stolen from the vent channel of a trans girl discord. Throughout its enormous runtime, the listener is bombarded with nauseating instrumentals laid over Roxy Radclyffe’s sprechstimme recitations and long tirades about specific trans social media discourse excised from its context.

     A strange reality of existing as a trans person online, is that that you end up writing long tirades about experiences, often inspired by the ocean of vitriol that you swim in (You may be on page 20 of one such tirade). I think constantly about the hours I wasted drafting up the perfect response to some newly-out trans chick’s reductive view of transsexuality, only to delete. Time I could’ve spent writing something I liked. On this album, Roxy takes that labor and, rather than wasting it, crafts an album that feels like the most realistic, unfiltered depiction of what the internet is. Even moreso, it personifies the horror of being trans online: traumatized, isolated and desperate to be heard.

     I don’t like it, but then again I don’t like the internet anymore. In that way it’s an enormous success. I remember reading a one-star review of one of my favorite albums: Plague Mass by Diamanda Galas, wherein the reviewer said that the album is the most important thing they’ve ever heard and that they hate that it has to exist. I feel something similar about Last Lull of the Laurel.

Album Review - Monarch of Monsters by Vylet Pony

     Back when my girlfriend and I were still flirting long distance, waiting for the other to make a move, I was up late listening to Can Opener’s Notebook: Fish Whisperer by Vylet Pony and texting her. She made a one-off joke about listening to brony music and I sent her a screenshot of what I was listening to. In return I got a bunch of exclamation points and a screenshot of her phone showing her listening to the same album. From that point on, especially after we started dating and moved in together, Vylet Pony had became one of our “us” artists. Someone we put on in the car whenever we drive long distances or send each other news articles about. The opening piano of “Where Everything is New” setting the stage for our drive together out west to be together.

     That’s all to say when “Monarch of Monsters” came out, I was already a huge fan and very sentimental about Vylet Pony’s music. Even so, I was not prepared. Her previous work is heavily EDM and synthpop, which I definitely love. But this album is an enormous shift. It’s like Swans if Michael Gira wasn’t a shithead, and was instead a trans brony. My first time listening felt eerily similar to the time I heard The Black Parade. Like something I would’ve made my whole personality as a teenager. It’s a consistently surprising record, moving from emo ragers like “Play Dead” to the epic multi-genre “The Wallflower Equation”.

     Musically, it’s kind of hard to believe. Vylet’s vocal performances here are at a level I really didn’t know she was capable of. From the high note at the climax of “The Wallflower Equation” to the unusual David Byrne style vocalizing on “Survivor’s Guilt” to the bone-chilling screams in “Sludge,” I sit in awe every time I listen through it. It’s very rare to love a musician as much as I already loved Vylet Pony, and discover that their talent goes so much further than I could have ever known.

     Monarch of Monsters is an album for the teenager I wish I could’ve been. It is unabashedly edgy, gay and dramatic in a way that connects with a younger version of me that hides somewhere under the surface of my heart. It’s an album I couldn’t believe, and one that makes me that much more excited for what’s next.

Conclusion

     To the artists featured here: thank you for trusting us with your work. The months I spent listening to them and writing this essay were a welcome escape from the nightmare around all of us. They inspired, comforted, surrounded and disarmed me. I did a lot of things subconsciously when I was in the throes of accepting my transsexuality, very little of which appeared at the time to have anything to do with my gender. Why did I start making these little, gay lists every year? Spending untold hours listening to hundreds of new albums. I realize now that it came from a desire to find others like me. To learn from their vulnerability. Each year my gay satellite listens and picks up more signals. Each year more stars flash in my window.

     On a final note, my album of the year last year is Sange fra en væg by Else Marie Pade. There isn’t much more I can say about it that wasn’t said throughout the beginning of this essay. Obviously, it’s the most important album that came out this year to me. It was the key to all of this. Instead of talking more about its content, here’s a poem I wrote after listening through it the first time:

Sange fra en væg by Else Marie Pade

Let’s survive this
and then let’s find each other with our ears

It’s getting dark but we can
listen for the source of the whispers

If you feel your way to me
Then we can find somewhere to wait for a while

experiment with new ways
to weep and whimper

leave crumbs of
of our sounds for others to follow

plan childhoods lived
in plain view

scratch it all into the walls
with our belt buckles

We’ll find them after
and devote our lives to being composers, I promise.