liner notes in a minor key
March 10th, 2026
This post contains liner notes for the r∞L4nGc (expanded) album. For me, writing an album takes several years and encompasses anywhere from 3-5 years of research, writing, reading, performing, and dialogical experiments. There are so many stories that weave throughout this music. It amounts to far too many stories to fit into a substack post, but here are some standout stories. Listen along while reading, if you please!
respite ∞ levity for the nameless ghost in crisis liner notes
01. respite for the tulpamancer
respite, which was once the coda of the album, went through several iterations and transformations, eventually becoming the lead single. I was shocked! My friend Keehnan said “Ok, Annie Lennox” !
The lyrics and melody originally emerged after practicing tulpamancy, and many of the strange voices and sounds that appear in the song are direct references to something I apparently have called “clairaudeinece,” which, as opposed to clairvoyance, means that phrases or words or melodies will appear to me, seemingly out of nowhere, especially when meditating.
02. gajo
I DEEPLY wanted to make a music video for this song, but couldn’t find the time and money and team to actualize it. Inspired by Jean Genet’s “The Thief’s Journal”, I envisioned a chronological narrative of two ruffian fags (myself and a crush I had at the time) stealing and almost getting caught (a favorite pastime of mine) ! In the final scene, in an antique shop, they almost get caught by police while stealing, smashing into and knocking over shelves of ceramics, glass, and metal as they punch police, create a huge mess in a choreographic fury, escaping the grasp of police and riding off into the sunset in the back of a pick-up truck, silently laughing and screaming, wind in their hair, bleeding but free.
03. Doll Park Doll Park
And thennnnn… camera pans off into the distance as a group of strangers wearing pink wigs deceend into a forest together. Cue:
Shooutout to Bobbi Salvor Menuez, creative director for this record, who helped me come up with the “nameless ghost” figure I perform as. They caught footage of it’s inception and we made this entire first half of the video mostly improvised. After making a bunch of ballads about grief and loss, I finally found myself ponging through these alarm-sound arpeggios. It was 4 am and I was alone in the studio, and something between the syncopated beat and cutty vocal phrases just felt right. I sent the song to Macy Rodman, and she sent me back an incredible folder of improvisations in response. True freak recognizes freak moment. I felt so HEARD by Macy’s responses, I realized one song was not going to be enough…
04. Dissimulato
This was the first track I finished for the record. After a stint of recording a sitting with a collection of songs I had recorded with an incredible band, I realized that wasn’t going to be the record, and grieved within the lostness of feeling like something had not landed yet in knowing what this record needed to be.
Cut to a winter studio session one year later with Kevin Kenkel who fired up his Moog Matriarch synth for us to play with. We drew together some arpeggios and audio chains, and this repeated arpeggiated phrase felt like I was immediately transported to somewhere else. A gate had been opened. Patrick Belaga came to the studio and delivered some fundamental deep cello. Aaron David Ross (1/2 of Gatekeeper) dropped in some phenomenal production, some reese bass, and vocal processing, and it was finished.
05. Losing Faith
My heart aches a bit for this song! It is the oldest of them all. The chord progression was written by Aaron Dicks and predates my earlier record, Siblings. The chord progression just haunted me. It’s hard to spend time with a song about lostness and feeling like giving up, losing someone, losing faith. This guitar lick from Michael Beharie felt like the first real thing to hold onto, where the lostness began to fade. Nick and Cecile helped pull this one out of the depths and, perhaps, most importantly, believed in me and brought some faith back into my songwriting practice.
06. {canting}
A lot of people have asked for a longer version of this song, and you know what, maybe I will release it soon. I made this song in about an hour when it felt like something silly, something I call a “sonic anecdote,” was needed and necessary to the completion of this album. From early Colin to present, I’ve always felt like these “sonic anecdotes” are important auxillary phrases to help paint a larger picture. It’s not an interlude. Canting is when a secret language hides and functions within a known language, like Polari.
07. Busy walks into The Memory Palace
I am a big fan of the vocal stylings of Kevin JZ Prodigy’s muse and vogue queen Vellalockwa, whose vocal improvisations are unparalleled. David Serotte introduced me to her years ago and I’ve beem obsessed ever since. She is truly channeling!! Bully Fae Collins got into character as “Busy Adams”, a time-traveling tiktok influencer from his role in Tip The Ivy. The song turned into this nasty, menacing, wobbly compositon that became an essential anchor to the grit and humor, and peculiarity that felt necessary in this dialogical haunting. Slipping, sitting, nasty, granular, playing with the ghost you met in the bathroom at the club in 2344.
08. paraphrase of a shadow
Perhaps my unexpected favorite of the record, paraphrase of a shadow was also born from my sessions with Kevin Kenkel. Late one night, the lyrics came out of my mouth in one single take. The percussion is made almost entirely out of the sounds of puppets. The puppeteer as a conduit for the spirit world is a very rich part of the history of puppetry. “He prays for you to see further, pouring a breath into the hands: a puppeteer…”
09. riddlecraft
One of the only songs to make its way from a 2020 commission with the Berliner Rundfunkchor for “The World To Come”, I cut up phrases of people shouting in Polari and anchored it to this menacing orchestral synth arpeggio that bleeds into these aleatoric vocals before landing within the architecture of these choral cluster chords. Annie’s “Hard Knock Life” but passing through dimensions of the spirit world.
10. gaolbreaker’s dream
Diamond Stingily, in all her genius, her courageousness, and her willingness, showed up and showed out in the studio to lay down vocals for the record. I handed her a copy of Jean Genet’s “The Thief’s Journal” and some poems I had written, and she began to read. In retrospect, I wish there were 3-5 of these tracks. The vivid clarity of this track, playing atop Eve Essex and Peter Arfsten’s flute improvisations, helped me realize what this record was: fragmented, partial vignettes as the listener traverses interdimensional figures and their lives, their loss, their love.
11. Tip The Ivy
This is another one that just flew out of my mouth. Every year I do “offline” time for a week and there is always a well-spring of music and words waiting for me when I do. Listening to the original demo from May 2021, there is so much information in that first version. So much romance in this handsome phrase “understood the changing shape of desire, it’s perpetual renewal of uncertainty” I was letting myself sit in simplicity for a moment. I really wanted to lean into this tenderness. Thank you Kevin and Michael and Nick and Eve for sitting with me in the simplicity of this one. The coda was originally going to be a field recording from a protest I attended, but it felt better to leave that one in the shadows.
12. ∞
Well, here we are! What was originally the beginning but became the end. This opening section was deeply informed by my time working with Lafawndah / KUKII and Brian Rodgers and Assia Ghendir and Chouf and Sandra on the Inanna opera. You can hear them singing in the background. I was writing vocal improvisations, and this one ended up really fitting with the music for the record.
To another portal I go, I go. Deeply informed by Albanian and Georgian choral music. The legend of the walled-in woman. I was imagining this slit of darkness opening up vertically in the sky and seeing myself drift further away, calling to myself as I stepped deeper and deeper and deeper into darkness. Descent into hell. Inanna. Persephone. A secret hidden Xena The Warrior Princess sample from years ago. Involution of Spirit turning inside out.
Darkness visible! In hindsight, I should have made this dance section of being torn apart longer— flying through layers of the multiverse, and who knows, maybe I will make that long version someday! Drew Daniel and Lyra Pramuk really helped me parse this one out. Tore up my voice and then put it back together.
lemniscate is the homecoming song. Singing to my 17 and 70 year old Self. I always wanted to do it with a trained choir. These swirling, twisting flutes and vocals are, in the best way, what it feels like to have spirits and angels swirling around you, whistling and singing. Now that’s what I call clairaudience!
13. The Thief’s Journal (feat. Baths)
Will Weisenfeld, you little angel. Martine’s beautiful voice. This was the first time in a long time I made a love song, inspired by the romances in Jean Genet’s book The Thief’s Journal. If there is one video I regret not making, it was having Lola Von Der Gracht and Josie Haar have a beautiful T4T romance and kiss in the rain with the camera circling them both. Originally written for a Liz Rosenfeld and Rodrigo Garcia Alves dance piece, I was shocked how many people told me that when the Japanese CD version of the album came out, it was their favorite song of all!
14. alphabet’s chant (feat. Geo Wyex)
Geo Wyex is the closest thing I have to a brother. I don’t have anyone else in my life who I have walked beside this way on this wild artist-composer journey. It has been one of my life’s great joys to have made art and music and performed with Geo over many years. For the opera Tip The Ivy, Geo and I were two versions of the same criminal: Alphabet & X. I will never forget Geo sitting with all the Polari vocabulary words laid out in front of him, writing the most beautiful poetry out of it. When I listen to this song, I can see Alphabet sitting at a piano under the bridge, singing as the spirit world sings along. There are so many unfinished songs with Geo, I hope to release some day.
15. Sissykins (The Glass Hooker) (feat. Macy Rodman)
In the middle of the night, a window busts open next to the bed and out falls a filthy purple and blue tulle cloud, palming itself on the floor as tufts of feathers, skin, saliva-smudged mascara, and stinky melted plastic synthetic hair gasps and screams. You notice a burnt tear in your tankini as the fabric of reality dissolves into a disembodied half-puppet half-demon tangle, dancing across high-beam floorboards, spitting and slipping as tooth marks begin to appear on your arm. A chicken bone appears in your wet purse. You chipped a nail on what you thought was a concrete gargoyle, but it turned out to be a gigantic glowing sandpaper locket. An angel with scotch tape covering one eye shaves her pussy and puts the hair in her mouth. Swallows it dry. He opens up his mouth to prove it, and he has the name DIANA tattooed on his upper lip. When you come to, you realize the Glass Hooker left her scissors upside down inside your eye cream. You didn’t wet the bed; you’re covered head to toe in black-light-activated toenail polish.
16. Alone (4th Version)
I fucking love this song.
17. Nanti Polari (feat. Iwona Sabotka)
Amidst the 2020 COVID-19 lockdown, somehow, a state-commissioned performance in which Tillman Hecker invited four other artists and me to respond to Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis (yuck!), and somehow it still happened even with the 98-person Berliner Rundfunkchor. I wrote my songs in Polari, and when the conductor realized what the lyrics meant, he first refused to have them performed and later sabotaged them. One of the only salvagable ones was Nanti Polari, sung so beautifully by Iwona Sabotka.
nanti polari nappi, nada filly days, only parnie in two and eight on your tod,
do a turn on the nanna catever days, namyarie namyarie coliseum curtains , tip the ivy, tip the ivy
nanti polar nappi, nada filly days, only parnie in two and eight on your tod, your tod
do a turn on the nanna catever days, namyarie namyarie namyarie namyarie coliseum curtains tip the ivy
namyarie yarie yarie coliseum curtains tip the ivy, the brandy,
18. LMO
is a polari acronym meaning “lick me out”. You can hear the choir shout it in gajo.
19. set in stone
Another Polari song about a ghost boy who took his life by diving into a storm at night. This song almost didn’t make it back from the band-recording sessions. Eve Essex’s beautiful saxophone playing was just too beautiful for me to pass up.
a fortuni dilly boy once died beyond the shore
took off his clobber and he dove into the storm
now he laus within the munge, a nuff but free and bold
to watch the sun as it dies away, he visits as a ghost
20. sunspew makes moonrune
a beautiful encryption prayer Claire Tolan wrote for Tip The Ivy, performed by Dia Dear:
Cackle of moon demands licking, taste its numbers
With your luppers, glugging down the throat, from screech
And eek to deep guts of lucent movement. The troll of moons
That keep cackling bringing delight to keepers of revolving
Orbs.
A signal was veiled with a silver gold garment
A silver gold garment of light22
Its signal was hidden, its reading forbidden
Except at the edge of the night
Sunspew makes moonrune
Lightspew of sun bent by moon
That the old chaos of the sun cast noise
Since long before, noises never ending
That a hollow moon latched itself to earth
Full of signal and urge wanting sending
That the broken lunar jar is patient
In its dripping, the form of cracks unchanged
A lucent logic
21. gajo (acoustic version)
In case you missed it, in 2022, I recorded an entire album with a band: drums, guitar, piano, choir, and at the end of it all, I felt incredibly uncertain about it all. I played this demo for friends, and one friend said it reminded them of Vanessa Carlton’s 1000 Miles. It is me being as raw and authentic, and I wasn’t sure if people would be willing to go with me there. Hindsight is 20/20 because I now love this version so much and look back on the hyper-criticality I had on myself at this point and wish I had stayed open and free enough to just let the music be. Maybe I am a lil Vanessa Carlton after all :,,)
22. Losing Faith (acoustic version)
Same thing with this song. I can’t tell if there is a lesson to be gleaned from all of this, or if it just is what it is. I love this cowboy-ass version. Fuck! It’s so beautiful. Michael Beharie on that guitar lick. I used to sit and cry to this song, thinking about all the insurmountable loss and this very strange role I’ve found myself in as an artist being called upon to make people see a glimmer of hope or liberation on the horizon, far, far away.
23. disobedient daughters (feat. Diamond Stingily & Eve Essex)
Bless Diamond Stingily for laying down the hottest muppet vocals I could have never even imagined asking for. A huge tonal shift, but a necessary departure song to finish up the story of this album. disobedient daughters was one of the first songs I wrote in this album cycle, and it somehow fell by the wayside.
“there’s a theory we’ve been surviving…”
A song about lineage, about reading and researching together, the collective yearning and curiosity around the histories of liberation and the figures that brought us there. There is a specific feeling of being in physical space, meeting others in solidarity, working toward direct action, and the energy and knowledge you can only truly understand from being involved in collective liberation.
I even made an at-home music video while in pandemic lockdown in Mexico that I am considering releasing.
This ending chant I recorded later in 2022 with the band, and I was going to lose my mind if it didn’t ever end up geting heard by the world. Even before realizing this album was about communing with the dead community and unnamed strangers who fought for my rights, I was finding my way. This was the final thing we recorded with the band and choir. The chant just came to me, and we did it. Standing in the room shouting this together with everyone is a memory I will never forget.
I will fight for you / because you fought for me / I will only stop / once everyone is free
This extended epitaph of two saxophone voices felt like an important demonstration of the continuous dialogue, the ongoing song of liberation sung back and forth, stretching into the future, into that which is yet to be known or named or seen.
Thank you to everyone who was a part of this project. Thank you to everyone who spent time with this music and this research. Thank you to everyone who has joined me onstage or in the audience. Thank you to everyone who bought the record and became a paid substack subscriber to support my art.
Love,
Colin Self
(No deep listening or reading recommendation on this post, because this is the reading and listening)