RECORD RELEASE: r∞L4nGc

February 17th, 2025

Hello World,

photos by Lauryn Siegel, 2021

We have had a lot of newcomers since my last post! Welcome all, I have been waiting for you here. You have great timing, a lot is happening. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber if you’d like to support my work.

I am elated to announce my third record, respite ∞ levity for the nameless ghost in crisis (r∞L4nGc) is coming out this Friday everywhere. It will be available on all streaming platforms and for physical purchase on my Bandcamp and the RVNG Intl. website. Two very exciting things are happening for the first time: my record is getting released as a limited edition Japanese import CD via label/distro Plancha with a bonus track made by myself and Will Wiesenfeld (Baths), and there is also a limited edition Artist LP which includes an original watercolor painting by me. I am moved to tears when I think of all the incredible people who made this record possible.

The record cover is one of several shrines created by Agosto Machado which became the artwork for the record and its singles. In case you are new to my substack, Agosto Machado is a legendary and crucial figure in the rich history of the New York underground and has very much become a spiritual guidance counselor of mine in the last few years.

I think now more than ever about Agosto carrying the torch of his friends Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, crucial figures to be named in a time when the Stonewall Monument page has removed the T from the LGBTQ on their website.

To briefly encapsulate a narrative ribbon running through our relationship, Agosto has created shrines and altars to commemorate his communities over the years, with a large portion of his community lost to AIDS/HIV, substance abuse, or suicide. Since I first began making performances, I always would name that my artistic practice was in reverence to the countless threads lost in the wake of the AIDS crisis, with an attempt to carry forward some ribbons of time from deceased friends and strangers.

Artist Xenia Taniko in my house, photo by me, 2017. Rest in Power Xenia.

My record, respite ∞ levity for the nameless ghost in crisis is a sonic shrine that commemorates the unknown and unnamed figures of my own counter-cultural community, community members who came before me, non-biological trancestors, and friends of mine who are no longer on this side. As a physical and musical entity that will spell itself out over the years to come, I made the record for the dead community, but also for those on this side who I anticipated might be in crisis come February 21st, 2025.

Nothing could have prepared me for how immense the need would be for love, for support, for compassion, and time to process and protest on behalf of the human spirit, to create and fortify psychic and spiritual armor. It feels to me like that armor began to form back in 2021 when I first started working on this record with Nick Hallett, Michael Beharie, Kevin Kenkel, Eve Essex, Peter Arfsten, AL Steiner, Diamond Stingily, and many others.

Nick Hallett by Lauryn Siegel

Kevin Kenkel by Lauryn Siegel

Michael Beharie by Lauryn Siegel

My relationship with many of my creative and spiritual guidance counselors; Every Ocean Hughes, AL Steiner, Geo Wyex, Asher Hartman, Lyra Pramuk, Agosto Machado, and others, have all led me down a path to examine our relationship with the dead community, to examine what it means to be alive, to tend to the relationship between the living and the dead, and to instigate a curious, reverent, and playful inquiry into how to be on this side.

There are countless threads I want to continue in relation to this, but the one thing that I feel deserves immense focus is the phenomenal collection of people who made this record possible, who spoke with me, sang with me, experimented, guided me, challenged me, and most of all gave me hope throughout what was at times a dark process of shadow work. A musical record is, for me, foremost a document of relationships and time, an exchange of energy and effort, and the miracle of music acting as a unifying medium for message relay.

My thank you list is so immense that it will have to be its own post, but it feels imminent to announce and invite you all to listen, to sit or travel with this record and let it be a conduit or respite and levity, contemplation and processing, for tears and dancing, rest and recuperation, rage and liberation, laugher and pain.

The burning horizon of our extreme present is ablaze with the ineffable transformation about what it means to be alive, how to be human together, how to survive and create meaningful time while we are here together on this side. To quote the opening track, respite for the tulpamancer:

‘I will hold you in the shadows until you are free.’

There will be an online listening party via Bandcamp on the 20th at 12-noon EST (18:00 CET), a listening party IRL in New York on the 21st (with some limited edition merch), a show in New Orleans, and then a XOIR session in New York!

Love,
Colin Self