Album Announce: r∞L4nGc / Agosto Machado
November 14th, 2024
To the wise souls to have stepped away from the shitshow that is the social media landscape at the moment, on Tuesday we announced my third LP, r∞L4nGc or respite and levity for the nameless ghost in crisis, coming out February 21st on RVNG Intl. The album will be released as a limited edition LP (including an edition of 50 watercolor paintings by me), and a Japanese CD with a bonus track. Please go tell it on the mountain! Tell as many friends as you can! I am deeply shadowbanned for talking about Gaza, so any signal boost is appreciated.
The first single from the record, respite for the tulpamancer, is out now, including a video I made with my friend/collaborator Bobbi Salvor Menuez. Its arrival feels timely and I would be lying if I said I wasn’t thinking about people needing islands of respite and levity within the circumference of 2024 ending and 2025 beginning.
Tulpamancy was something introduced to me by Nora Khan when I visited her at La Becque in 2021, so it feels apropos to be back here again in 2024 releasing a song that thematically centers around this esoteric practice of communing with one’s own shadow. Tulpamancy began as a practice for me to sit with my doubts, my fears, and my grief, and to listen and create space for them to be heard— and gradually it led me to many online forums and communities that would expand my idea of what a tulpa is for, can do, and can become.
I believe that music and performance will continue to be a sanctuary for many in the years to come. At its center, I made this record as a kind of sonic shrine for all of you, for myself, and for whatever helping spirits, angels, ancestors, guardians, and guides we call forward to be with us here and now.
If you missed it, I also released an EP and single for the song lemniscate a few weeks ago. Releasing music is a fuckin’ uphill battle, y’all. I am immensely grateful for the support I have and all the incredible words of affirmation I have received since releasing this music that keeps me going, but it also has become devastatingly obvious to me how hard it is to vie for people’s attention for new music and for people to sit and listen and be present with a song, let alone convince new audience members to care. A subtext of this record relief is the grief for a music world that once was and looking toward the spirit world for guidance to find a path forward.
A few years ago I was introduced by my friend Tourmaline to Agosto Machado, an incredible artist and crucial figure in the history of Downtown New York, a good friend of Sylvia Rivera, Marsha P. Johnson, co-conspirator of the Stonewall Riots, and an integral figure of John Vaccaro’s Play-house of the Ridiculous, in the company of the Warholian dolls and the legacy of Pyramid Club. Agosto creates shrines that commemorate deceased community members; the countless figures lost to the AIDS crisis, and those who made up “the ensemble of life” as he calls it. Immediately upon meeting Agosto, I felt a deep sense of kinship, joy, and reverence for his thoughtful way of being with the dead community and the impact they’ve created on our lives.
As we venture into the darkness together in these forthcoming years, I cannot think of a more integral example of how to be in the world in relation to loss— celebrating the communities that have come before us— some friends, some strangers, and creating shrines to remember them and their legacies, who they were and how they were in the world, as a thread to carry forward.
I very much wanted to make this record as a sonic shrine for myself. I have sadly lost a lot of loved ones over the years. Some of you know them, others are strangers. Most people reading this also have lost someone they care about and live here, on this side, living to carry forward a legacy that may otherwise be forgotten.
What began as a narrative around guidance, guardian angels, and the resemblance I see of deceased loved ones in myself, gradually turned to also think about the countless others— those who I cannot name, who I cannot see or hear or know, who created the world I live in today. A sonic shrine is, for me, a way to encapsulate this immaterial practice and to create dialogical experiments with others as to how we can pull these songs into performance and create a kind of ceremony that is not a funeral, nor a circus, nor a concert, nor a public grievance, but perhaps something that, too, is still without a name.
Despite everything unfolding this week, I feel a sense of optimism in the coalitions that have been built, the sanctuaries and communities that have been doing the work for decades. I keep feeling the need to reiterate that you are not alone across time. The illusion of linear space-time and the limitations of being only with those who are physically around you is just—- not it!!! I will assemble a list of resources for the next post on here but for now, listen to this music and be soft, be slow, write, play, grieve, scream, kickbox, shake, run, or just lay in bed for a bit if you need it.
Love,
Colin Self
DEEP LISTENING:
Moi!
CURRENTLY READING:
Edouard Glissant - The Poetics of Relation (again)
