Mope Grooves – ‘Box Of Dark Roses’ out October 25, 2024
12XU 157-1
Liners
I lived in the burning house on the cover between 2016-2019, with two and sometimes three close friends, including my partner & bandmate cap, who contributed so much to this record in particular, Kyle, who is featured on every record we made and lived there for a decade, and another cultural worker named Laura Anne, who hosted events at the house and always encouraged my art. I transitioned in that house, and I wrote, assembled, and partially recorded the 4 LPs we put out from 2017-2019 therein with my friends. We practiced in the basement. We were evicted for not mowing the lawn enough. The house sat mostly vacant for a few years, completely overgrown. Neighbors say it was a squat sometimes, and I hope the house treated them good. When it burned down, me and cap were living in a trailer in the woods, hundreds of miles from portland. i was devastated. As far as we know nobody was hurt in the fire.
The house I’m pictured hosing down is the next house we were booted from. That day it was 120 degrees F and we had no central AC. Obv the hose didn’t rly help & me and CA’s room on the 2nd floor was much hotter than a sauna. That kind of heat is rly bad for the evergreens, and ppl were saying huge swathes of oregon’s forests might become desert in my or someone healthy’s lifetime.
The house of unchecked flames and fuming cinders where friends used to live is one of many boxes of dark roses in this record, box of dark roses, whose title paraphrases an Alfred Starr Hamilton poem called ‘Slow Parlor.’ I think Alfred was an egg.
‘Slow Parlor’
Are you afraid of time?
Are you afraid of the clock
that unwinds itself in the slow parlor?
Do you know of a drop of rain
that falls on the spindle?
Are you a friend of a box of dark June roses?
Do you know of the pendulum
that swings to the June chimes?
I clocked Alfred as an egg when I read some of the unpublished poems in the back of ‘A Dark Dreambox of Another Kind.’ Ppl called Alfred a recluse, an outsider artist, an extremely good poet. Nobody ever knows a secret heart but a girl can recognize the contours of a subversive gender even in the murky depths of cistory. From the notebooks found after Alfred’s death:
‘The Caine Mutiny’
I am around
I am around differently
I am around a woman who is showing them herself
I thought of showing them myself
I thought it needed to be admired
I thought it needed to be admired differently
I thought I admired myself
I thought I did my long hair in bows
I thought I admired my long hair
I thought I explained my whereabouts
I thought I explained my full soul
I thought I explained my full adventure
To me, all our records are about being a trans girl, but I don’t think I talked about it in a way cis ppl find legible. Cis ppl and their media apparatuses completely take the initiative in interpreting these records which I write about my near-death experiences with transmisogyny, and they do it partly bc I let them and partly bc theres no other way. I wanted to go on tours and sell my records and my friends records, so I needed ppl to write about us, so I sent cis ppl my records and asked them to talk about us on their awful websites. This was after I went thru the grueling process of starting a diy label and booking my own shows/tours, organizing with other survivors of SA/DV to try and build a community insulated from the rampant abuse in underground music. It’s too much work to just hand the initiative over to our tormentors. So I’ll be interpreting this record in advance and doing whatever I can to get it to trans critics first, so that maybe trans perspectives can be first out the gate.
There’s other poets besides Alfred on the record, too. Marilyn Buck was a prolific poet as well as a revolutionary, and her comrade Kuwasi Balagoon was also a poet. Towards the end of the record, Marilyn recites Uruguayan radical poet Mario Benedetti’s ‘Why do we sing?’ Alejandra Pizarnik, one of my favorites and a big influence on my lyrics, perhaps by chance explains a major element of this project in a poem we quote, ‘Gesto Para Un Objeto.’ On the same side of the LP there’s another poet, one of Pizarnik’s favorites, Gerard de Nerval, who I paraphrase and then quote directly. Pizarnik and Nerval were no strangers to the funny farm and I consider them kindred spirits. I let my memories of psychiatric incarceration haunt this side of disc one next to memories of trace glimpses of liberation and the angelic insight u get when youre pressed right against the veil. I was a child in the psych ward, I was a young adult in the psych ward, and with any luck one day I’ll be an old woman in the psych ward. I hope all the trans girls reading this know how important it is to me personally that they survive.
If there’s one thing I want to share with other trans ppl in music, it’s this:
If you are going to do DIY music, u are going to have to organize against the predators in and around your communities from day one. When u do this, I absolutely beg u to use these three tools:
1. Anonymity
2. Collective action (collective as in decided and executed mutually with self-critique and an ever-evolving analysis that centers the most marginalized)
3. Physical consequences
U need all three.
When I started rly doing this band it w.as just before Me Too, and the mood was that we were going to confront abusers publicly, as public people, with our names and faces and places we work visible for all to see. Nobody knew that we’d all be threatened, sued, bad jacketed, and left completely unprotected by the wider community, that the local papers would leave sources open to defamation suits, that all the abusers’ friends would close ranks and trumpet a counter-narrative that plays deftly on their structural advantages, and that being called out changed nothing materially about a predator’s ability to harm 99% of the time. I don’t remember anyone around me articulating that the retaliation would often be worse than the individual acts of violence that led us to organize in the first place.
Everybody learned tho. But after we learned many ppl simply disappeared, and now there are completely new music scenes who have no collective memory of what happened. It shouldn’t be that every generation has to start from scratch. It shouldn’t be that ppl don’t know that in this city and thruout the northwest, fifty years ago, queers fought for anarchy, communism, feminism, and decolonization with guns and bombs (Creating A Movement With Teeth: A Documentary History of the George Jackson Brigade). They learned a lot, and thankfully they wrote it down, and now you can know a lot of what they knew.
Leaps in struggle are always being hashed out simultaneously in cultural work – in music, painting, dance, poetry, fashion, sideshows, graffiti, and all cultural production on and offline. In my experience, just like in the most intense forms of political struggle, the structures that we create to counter oppression culturally need to prefigure the revolutionary social formations we’re trying to unleash. We aren’t looking for atomized individual hells thru liberation, and we shouldn’t be alone and isolated in revolt. We aren’t searching to perpetuate the colonial logics of domination and exploitation, and so our structures should seek to preclude hierarchy and white supremacy. So altho this record and project are imperfect, with one foot in the old world, I wanted the record to ask how we can apply these organizing principles to DIY music, where the fundamental organizational structure is usually an individual artist or a small group of artists and their ‘intellectual property.’ I wanted to ask:
Can musical affinities bleed into other affinities?
Can fundraisers become expropriations?
Can artists stop or interrupt femicide?
Of course, the answers are yes, but under what conditions? When are artists also guerillas, and not just ‘guerilla artists’? What conditions do we need to create for culture to accelerate the decline of empire instead of conspiring in its survival?
In the record I tried to connect the dots between fascism, settler colonialism, reformism, and the tension between liberation and assimilation in trans communities. I tried to raise questions around these topics bc i think an escalation of trans genocide is imminent. Basically what I want to ask is: how does transmisogyny affect class relations in a settler colonial context? It’s a good question for trans girls in music to ask each other. Some who are white settlers like me are reluctant to push an analysis of settler colonialism into our own lives. Because they see the ppl who run the government openly calling for our extermination, they (wrongly) assume we dont wield structural power over racialized ppl. Often it’s because we’re caught up in comparing our material reality with the most lavishly rewarded settlers in the colonial matrix (cisgender, able-bodied, neurotypical, housed christian whites). In reality, we should be comparing our material situations to other trans women. Altho it’s often only begrudgingly acknowledged, everyone knows the staggering homicide rate is happening in racialized, especially Black, transfeminine communities. Even tho I’m currently shut out of the formal economy and experiencing 10+ years of intermittent housing insecurity, I recognize my continued survival has been underwritten by my whiteness time and time again. Even as I have watched some girls like me die (I mourn them as I sharpen my tools), I recognize in my own city that a surprising number of white trans girls are techies and gentrifiers. I kno from media that we run for office and even (rarely) become pigs. This is wholly out of proportion with the rest of the transfem community. Yet bc we have, in the settler imagination, proximity to the racialized communities that developed house, ballroom culture, and other networks of cultural survival, many white trans girls assume it’s our prerogative to speak in a grotesque caricature of African American English, and to position ourselves as leading figures (and sometimes principal beneficiaries) of oppressed ppls’ cultural communities, often while maintaining some enduring ties to the colony’s most protected settler classes (such as openly racist biological extended family).
So this record tries to suggest that instead of reproducing the culture of parasitism that constitutes the defining feature of settler music from the earliest days of the colony to the present, we resist the poisoned chalice of hyper visibility to whatever extent is possible, we protect ourselves with anonymity and collective responsibility, and we return whenever possible the fruits of our cultural work to the frontlines -> to women and other gender marginalized ppl who are locked in cages for defending themselves. We need closer links with ppl who the state are trying to vanish, and culture work is a bridge for those relationships. We at the very least need to affirm that they made the right choice by fighting to survive.
So all the money that would otherwise be apportioned to the band or me for this record will go to gender marginalized survivors incarcerated as punishment for defending themselves, either directly to their fundraisers/commissary funds or thru the Survived and Punished NY mutual aid fund, which distributes to survivors’ commissary funds and visitation funds. Everyone involved in releasing the record will make receipts publicly available. This is the record’s material commitment to eroding the system it describes. It is not charity, because we recognize that as survivors and trans people our fate is tied to our incarcerated comrades, and the future of our struggle is decided by those that fight to survive.
I do want to make it clear tho that I dont cast any aspersions on ppl who are against all odds carving out a subsistence living out of cultural work. Ppl should be paid, and I did everything I could to pay ppl for performing on this record with my own wages when I had them.
Everyone is a musician. Sun Ra went a step further and pointed out that everyone is music. At any given moment, what would be the most beautiful music ever recorded is eluding capture by recording technologies, civil institutions, and capitalism in general. The musicians making it are holding space for a future where the hegemonic order cannot harness music for its own ends because that order has been utterly destroyed. There will be music when the last prison is burning, and every burning prison is itself musical in the extreme. With such music in our ears, the dominant cultures of theft that today aggregate into the aboveground and underground music industries would leave much to be desired. The logics of reform and compromise would lose coherence, and so much of what is now called culture would reveal itself to be a monument to atrocity on smoldering remains. If in this world u’ve made yourself queen of the ash pile, the girls in the next world will kno u by your filthy hands.
I funded the recording process and the deposit on my surgeries by submitting my body to hyper-exploitation. I worked vanilla jobs 40-70 hours a week most of the time before relying increasingly on the informal economy. I was frequently in severe pain and losing work from chronic disabling illnesses that are aggravated by intense labor. I was reluctant at first to ask for support, until disability completely shut me out of the formal economy, at which point I started to rely on the wider community to keep my surgeries in the realm of possibility. Community support made this record possible, and some of my closest friends played on this record without being properly compensated financially, which pains me.
The informal economy is a dynamic and ruthless place where contact with structural antagonists is sometimes maximized so the most precarious workers can navigate capitalism’s uneven terrain. Girls often pass thru here on our way to life saving treatments. Moving thru it has sharpened my tools. Centering de-classed & disabled girls in your analysis can help dispel a lot of myths about the proletariat, and is a good step towards reckoning with just how much under or uncompensated gendered and racialized labor goes into reproducing the proletariat, who are to say the least unevenly incentivized to support our liberation. (It bears mentioning here that most settler workers aren’t even really proletarians and are a de facto extension of the police force). Acknowledging the invisibilized informal economy and its systematically trivialized contributions is a good step towards cutting any lingering attachments to 20th century radicalisms built on supposedly great men. I do believe that the self-organization of wage laborers is going to help set off the next wave of struggle. But this is a half measure if it doesn’t recognize the most marginalized and de-classed, who are freezing to death at the gates of wage labor.
Along with at least a thousand hours of work from me personally and hundreds from my friends, this record took money to make. The background noise of where this money came from is audible throughout the record, and making this money was the largest and most significant part of the composition process. Some songs were partially composed while I worked. Many were written while I lie in bed, in intense pain and unable to move, missing work because I worked too much.
Speaking of money, in the song ‘ home sick,’ you can hear me put $7,500 into a cash counter at my surgeon’s office. It had traveled in my backpack as i drove over a thousand miles with no driver’s license to the most expensive office suite i have ever seen. i was very self conscious about how i smelled, having slept on couches, missed showers, and walked around in the rain all day. i was in a lot of pain too, but i left my cane in the van bc i was afraid they would think i’m too sick to be operated on.
The record was recorded mostly in Plague Year 2&3 and will be released in Plague Year 4. Nothing was recorded in Plague Year 0, when millions were following the lead of Black youth in pushing the George Floyd – Breonna Taylor Uprising as far as possible. Nothing will ever be the same and we will not pretend otherwise.
There’s also a spiritual aspect to this project that is more important than I’m letting on. The record was shaped around what i perceived to be an encounter with two angels. i experienced them as two beings made of shadow and light, in long dresses, who walked into the room as if they were walking off the screen of a black and white movie, as sharply defined and corporeal as if two extraordinary looking humans had wandered into a bedroom. When i saw them i closed my eyes and layed down on the floor. i put my hand over my heart and was overwhelmed by their love and protection. They communicated that they were with me, and had always been and would always be. i replied that i was so grateful, and that in return I would give my life to what I would describe now as struggle, to move into the sharpest contradictions like u dive into a wave, to reach into darkness to pull out life, to veer always towards the tension that explodes into liberation – women’s liberation, trans liberation. Later i would come to believe that one angel came from what i perceived as the past and one from the future, and that they made contact with me to complete a circuit and know themselves, so that god can kno herself, which is struggle knowing its history and future. i believe, without much evidence, that experiences like this are not uncommon for the girls. Or the bois. Its obvious that the angels were on my mind constantly while we made this record, and i often think about what i promised them, how the three of us push outward thru time, into tension, dysphoria, release, and joy.
Most of this record was sequenced before it was recorded. It was sequenced as 4 sides of an LP even tho I haven’t had a record player in ten yrs, bc I personally think the physical media will be here in five years and the rest might not. I was surprised at how close the final sequence is to the earliest ones i wrote down before almost anything was recorded. The record was written as an entire record, which often meant working on 27 songs at the same time. That mostly looked like me carrying around a notebook with all the song fragments and provisional titles and staring at it all day for years. One time, in the shower, the songs were flashing thru my head so fast i felt like I could see the contours of the whole thing at once. Mostly, i felt like I couldnt. Many performers on this record wrote their parts on the spot, especially drummers (acoustic and electronic), and i left space for these improvisations whenever possible. So even tho the record is in some ways labored over and planned to the extreme, many of the plans were ‘Penny is gonna write a beat for this keyboard part on the spot. Cap is gonna find sounds and play off this rhythm. Lee and Cap will find a dissonant harmony for this melody. I’m gonna get XYZ in the same room and we’re all gonna play off this recording.’
All contributors were of course drawing from a lifetime of listening to other ppl’s music, all of which is indebted to the cultures of ppl resisting colonialism and slavery. The idea that some of these contributions (the lyrics, arrangement, and melody) make one person the rightful owner of the music as ‘intellectual property’ and the rest incidental background players is the euro-logic behind the enclosure of the commons. Its a parasitic structure shaped in part by the parceling out of land for settlers and the enslavement of Africans. In the u.s., the law around who gets publishing rights for popular music was built around the practice of writing down the lyrics and melody of Black musicians and then selling those compositions as sheet music. There is no music made by one writer, and there is no writer who is not drawing on centuries of uncompensated cultural workers and the marginalized communities that steward their traditions. Every settler musician perpetuates the dynamics of racial capitalism and the vast majority do not even pretend to care. This project seeks to begin addressing how to remove itself from these logics, logics which are in my opinion the root cause and end goal of all shitty music.
The images repeat and repeat in this record so that they can make ever-widening circles until each of them contains the whole project. I see this move in Alfred Starr Hamilton’s daffodils and sedges and in Pizarnik’s forests and nights. Things happen twice, things triangulate, because I’m always re-creating the encounter with the angels, because strange apparitions from the past are always leaping into the present, because struggle is always knocking on the door. The angels are why there’s so much close harmony, mixing of computer and animal time, conversations between antiquated and modern recording technologies (most songs are recorded on at least five different mediums, iPhone voice memos to samplers to reel to reels to audacity to more reel to reels to protools), and mixing of solo planning and group improvisation. Marilyn Buck is next to Aileen Wuornos for a reason. Bo Brown is next to Kuwasi Balagoon for a reason. Lots of the excerpts were chosen rly early in the process. The lyrics are working thru questions raised by the excerpts and vice-versa. It’s a record where the listener is asked to create the future and unmake the world as it is.
CA worked shoulder to shoulder with me on so much of this record. They also lived with my obsession with it, very supportively and patiently, and encouraged me every step of the way. Their contributions are crucial, especially their use of found sounds in the MPC and their inventive harmonic sensibility. They also taught me how to use the MPC, which i used a lot during the last four months of working on the record. On top of that we’re in love and have been living together in small, inhospitable spaces for years. It simply could not have happened without them. This record should be understood as a testament to their talent, style, and imagination.
Penny and Lee recorded us for free in their bedroom probably about 30 times. Like in between going to work and recording their other projects. Hundreds of hours of their time. Again this record doesn’t exist without them and their contributions are everywhere.
When I was writing for this, I was always imagining showing the finished record to a couple people: Laura Anne, who I talk about art and spirituality with more than anyone else and who is always saving my life, and Irene, my pen pal who is a writer and has been talking with me about trans girl stuff for years. Irene even helped edit these liner notes, which im embarrassed to say used to be even longer. I didn’t rly have a mentor as much as i wanted but I had these two and they rly helped me connect the dots. Thank you. If i’m ever hard to get a hold of u can find my whole heart in here.
Featured in the excerpts:
Marilyn Buck – A revolutionary and poet from the May 19th Communist Organization who participated in solidarity actions with the Black Liberation Army in the Revolutionary Armed Task Force. Marilyn Buck assisted in one of the great victories of the long sixties, the liberation of Assata Shakur, who walks free to this day. May she live many decades longer than this empire. Marilyn Buck was incarcerated for 30 years after an ill-fated armored car robbery, after which her comrade Kuwasi Balagoon was also captured. She spent the next three decades incarcerated, where among other things she gave the interview that appears throughout this record. She developed uterine cancer in prison and was released less than a month before her death. Her voice appears on ‘controlled burn’, before ‘highway of crucified angels’, at the end of ‘life is good’, and before ‘box of dark roses.’
Kuwasi Balagoon – A revolutionary and poet who was among those incarcerated in the Panther 21 conspiracy case against the New York chapter of the Black Panther Party. His distaste for the hierarchical structure of the party lead him and others to re-approach struggle as a self-identified New Afrikan anarchist. He took up arms with the Black Liberation Army, a decentralized and clandestine network of armed cells, with the end goal of securing a liberated territory for the Black African diaspora in the South East ‘united states.’ He also participated in the liberation of Assata Shakur and was incarcerated for his role in the armed car robbery that snared many of his comrades. He turned his trial into a public indictment of imperialism, and this record quotes an excerpt sourced from “Kuwasi Balagoon: A Soldier’s Story” (Kersplebedeb and PM Press) in the track ‘continue & intensify’. Having been handed a 75 year sentence, he wrote that he was not worried since he was not in the habit of finishing sentences (he had escaped from prison twice already), and because he did not think the empire would last another 75 or even 50 years. I think this will prove to be basically correct, but unfortunately Kuwasi Balagoon died in prison from complications related to AIDS only a few years into his sentence. He was unabashedly queer during a time when it was heavily stigmatized even in some of the most radical movement spaces. He was beloved by his comrades and his legacy alone is an invaluable contribution to liberation worldwide.
Bo Brown – A revolutionary lesbian militant feminist (who also wrote poetry!), Bo Brown was radicalized in prison. Upon being released, her participation in prisoner support organizing led her to the nucleus of the George Jackson Brigade, an anarchist and communist armed struggle organization operating in the Pacific Northwest. The GJB racked up a dizzying list of bombings and expropriations, even busting their comrade out of custody. They took care to coordinate their actions with the local labor movement, as well as international militant struggle against imperialism. Their actions, communiques, and coverage in mainstream and radical press are chronicled in ‘Creating A Movement With Teeth’ (PM Press). An excerpt from ‘The Gentleman Bank Robber,’ a documentary about Bo Brown and the George Jackson Brigade, is included in the track ‘switch cars,’ where Bo explains the rhythm of a typical expropriation. Bo Brown passed away in 2021 after a long battle with Lewy Body Dementia.
Michelle – A transfem sex worker who worked the blade in Vancouver, BC and was interviewed extensively in 1984 documentary ‘Hookers On Davie” by Janis Cole and Holly Dale. Michelle coordinated with other sex workers and local organizers to maintain the autonomy of independent escorts, mitigate harassment from pimps and pigs, and agitate against the regressive local ordinances that eventually pushed workers off Davie street, paving the way for its gentrification over the ensuing decades. We honor Michelle’s courage in sharing her story on camera, particularly her unapologetic insistence on surviving by any means necessary in the face of unrelenting violence from all corners of society.
This record also mentions Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Research and the community of gender subversives around it in weimar-era berlin. We include what is essentially a 3 minute wikipedia article from a parallel universe to draw attention to the countless echos between that historical moment and the contemporary climate of transantagonism that prevails in the so-called usa. For some harrowing accounts of this milieu and what befell it, read Leah Tigers’ ‘On The Clinics and Bars of Weimar Berlin,’ which I hadn’t read before I wrote the song but which comes to a similar but much more rigorous and elegant critique of liberal reformism during the rise of fascism:
Despite the Institute for Sexual Science’s socialist, even communist tendency, whatever tepid liberalism it absorbed through its governing body made it suicidal as well. Its project for so-called “sexual intermediaries,” to make us social creatures, was split between the disciplinary task of reconciling transgender subjects to the State, and the reformist task of reconciling the State to its transgender subjects. By this tactical split it could stand for neither, and neither came to pass. There is no greater reminder of this failed reconciliation with the Weimar Republic than the Nazi state which freely succeeded it, and there is no greater reminder of the failure of the Institute than the label of the small, black, triangular patches that state assigned in its death camps to some of its trans women, but more of its sex workers: “Asocial.”
http://www.trickymothernature.com/insideout1.html
We also pay tribute to Aileen Wuornos in this record, not to further disturb her rest with another lurid exploitation of her story, but to confirm that it should come as no surprise that she had to defend herself with lethal force seven times over the course of a year while turning tricks off a rural highway in florida. She was a human being who deserved love and safety. What’s more, we recognize her as an unorganized militant in a millenia-long struggle against patriarchy.
Lyrics & Credits
performance by stevie, cap, Lee Butterfield (they/them), Penny Olives (she/her), Elias Williamson (they/them), Izzy Dupuis, Ana Díaz Sacco (she/they), Clinton O’Brien, Evan Mersky, Ana María Rodríguez (she/her), Ray Aggs (they/them), & Kyle Raquipiso
Side A
1. controlled burn
when we see u in the next world, we will kno u by your roses
Marilyn Buck: Since the early 70s I have been a target of cointelpro, though I can’t show you any documents ’cause I can’t get any papers. But I think the u.s. government, that … number one they fear a change in the status, they fear the liberation of Black people, of Native American people, of Puerto Rico … they fear the breakup of the empire.
[stevie – tom, MPC-one, mellotron. Lee – vocals, cap – vocals]
2. Aileen
in the dark, there is love in her heart. in the wild, there is love in her life.
they’ll tell you youre a criminal for paying them back in kind, but in the dark, in the wild, in the heart of the night, it is right to fight.
[cap – mpc-one, vocals, stevie – synth, mellotron, vocals Ana Díaz Sacco – vocals and synth programming, Lee – vocals]
3. pieces of god
hell that it was, such a long summer, when it was over, no one could remember my name
a living hell that it was, waiting to be caught. i’m only slow cause I’m holding everything I forgot.
pieces of god, leaking from the ceiling. pieces of god, weeping down my hair.
pieces of god, falling off the wall. calling my name, pieces of god.
pieces of god, under my shoe. beautiful music, pieces of god.
pieces of god, holding your hand. whisper ‘i love you. pieces of god.
pieces of god, smoking in foil. pieces of god feeding the soil pieces of god.
pieces of god, lettuce and rabbits, pure and living water, mountains of fire, pieces of god pieces of god.
[stevie – vocals, mellotron, cymbal, bass, synth, Elias – drums, cap – MPC-one, vocals, harmony arrangement, Penny – synth, sampler, Lee – field recording]
4. forever is a long time
but I’m afraid to miss the payoff.
forever is a long time, but I’m afraid to miss the chaos.
i open my palm and signal a car called forever
i reach into darkness and signal a car called forever
forever is a long, long time
i live off the blade, but i’m not here for a long time
i reach into darkness and signal a car called forever
[Elias – drums, stevie – vocals, farfisa, tambourine, bass, cap – vocals, MPC-One, Ana Díaz Sacco – drums]
5. do you hear music?
in the empty room, i can hear music
do u hear music? sometimes I don’t even want to.
when the matchstick hisses in the dark that’s music.
do u hear music? when the house fell down I could hear music.
do u hear music? and doesnt it change the mood?
when my footstep kisses the roof it makes music.
[stevie – guitar, mellotron, sampler, Izzy – vocals, cap – vocals]
6. home sick
can we talk now? cause it calms me down
u always understood me so good. u always understood.
u knew just what to say when we lost the house again.
r u homesick? r u warm and fed?
i hope u kno i love u so much
[stevie – MPC-one, mellotron, vocals, Lee – vocals, cap – vocals, MPC-One]
Side B
7. we won
when the hammer falls, the metal rings dark, like a shadow falls, the metal rings dark on the stone.
we won.
i am so happy omg i am crying i am so happy in my life i was not afraid of dying young
we won.
turn on the scanner! “there is no long term plan and reinforcements are not coming anytime soon” (laughter)
and the adversary is finished, and the adversary is vanished.
when the shadow falls the metal rings dark like a satellite falls the metal rings dark on the stone.
and the fash vanish. there is weeping in the house of the pig. there is joy in the house of the doll.
we won.
u can hear them panic on the scanner. turn on the scanner. hear them panic.
[cap – MPC-One, vocals, Penny – drums, stevie – vocals, reface-cp, synth, sampler]
8. swail
some people say ‘raise the wages, or we’ll strike’ (laughter)
some people say ‘stop the femicides, AND we will attack again’
[stevie – mpc-ONE, mellotron]
9. here comes the moon
look out, here comes the moon
look out, here comes your new room
look out, here comes your room
look out, here comes the dark
and life won’t stay the same
look out, here comes the moon
Marilyn Buck: ‘ … and they fear the people who are committed to doing that. I have a 70 year sentence for, um, participating in the liberation of Assata Shakur. No matter what they have done to me, the years in prison, the years in isolation, that … I have not renounced that. I have never recanted that’
(now I see what makes them pieces, now I see what makes them …)
[stevie – guitar, vocals, mellotron, bass, Elias – drums, Lee – vocals, cap- vocals]
10. hallway of crucified angels
have u heard the angels in the wall?
have u heard them crying in their gowns upon the crosses in the hallway of the hospital?
have u seen them crying out for violence from the broken crystal future and the frozen roses of the past?
have u seen them cry?
Elles sont les ténébreuses, les veuves, les inconsolées.
[lee – vocals, cap – vocals, stevie – reface cp, mellotron, vocals, MPC-one]
11. fox highway
now the swallows block the sunlight. now their shadows cross the moon.
how their voices wash the silence. how their noises carve the air.
now the highway thick with roses. now the foxes cross it home.
now i see what makes them pieces, now i see what makes them whole.
now the neighbors leave their porches. now their window’s always dark.
how our faces change in shadow. how our questions miss the mark.
how their house would fill with people. how their laughter shook the wall.
now i see what makes them pieces. now i see what makes them whole.
(from Gesto para un objeto –
En tiempo dormido, un tiempo como un guante sobre un tambor.
Los tres que en mí contienden nos hemos quedado en el móvil punto fijo y no somos ni un es ni un estoy.
Antiguamente mis ojos buscaron refugio en las cosas humilladas, desamparadas, pero en amistad con mis ojos he visto, he visto y no aprobé.
– Alejandra Pizarnik)
[cap – vocals, MPC-one, field recording, Lee – vocals, Penny – drums, stevie – mellotron, guitar]
12. remind me why
(from El Desdichado by Gérard de Nerval:
La fleur qui plaisait tant à mon coeur désolé. La treille où le pampre à la rose s’allie)
[stevie – mellotron, bass, vocals, sampler, synth, cap – vocals, Ana Díaz Sacco – vocals, Elias – drums Evan – ride]
13. wind follows me home
from the shop, where i close up in the dark, the wind follows me home.
from the corner, where i dont pick up the phone, the wind follows me home.
let me go, let me turn into smoke. let me go, let me turn around in the air.
from the road, where i fall in the snow, the wind follows me home.
from the road, where u call out to a ghost, the wind follows you home.
[stevie – vocals, guitar, MPC-one, drums, mellotron, cap – vocals]
Side C
14. cap hits the button
after a flower’s grown, after all of her eyes uncover,
we can look in through any gold crown and see out from every other.
after a doll is born, after all of her friends turnover,
she can look in to any slain angel, she sees out from every other.
after a flower’s passed under all of their horses trampled,
we can shoot out from any burnt honda til every rose is answered.
[cap – MPC-one, vocals, stevie – reface-cp, Lee – vocals, Clint O’Brien – double bass, Evan – drums]
15. Si fuese violetas
Visión distante de una blusa voraz, triste disfraz, un fuego decadente.
Visión distante de una estrella fugaz. Estar juntas, algo que me prometiste,
algo que me pediste, algo que nunca fue.
Si fuese fuego, me quemaría hoy.Si fuese violetas crecería hoy.
Si fuese fuego, quemaría todo.
Si fuese violetas, crecería.Si fuese fuego, crecería hoy.
[Ana Díaz Sacco – vocals, drums stevie – mellotron, bass, sampler, cap – MPC-one]
16. wall of swords
all the shadows from before me, theyre always leaping thru my crooked smile
and the shadow i am, she’s always weeping under this wall of swords.
she’s always waking up beneath this wall of swords.
all their sisters are in cages, theyre always showing me how the triggers squeezed,
and their mothers’ graveyards, theyre always freezing near me beneath the swords.
theyre always leaping thru this wall of swords.
[stevie – reface-cp, MPC-one, vocals, cap – MPC-one, vocals, Kyle – sub-bass, synth, Lee – vocals]
17. switch cars
Bo Brown – ‘Basically what you’re gonna do is go in this bank, take their money, get in your car, get on that freeway, go some place really really quick, and switch cars.
And once we became known, that it was the GJB, all we had to say was, ‘this is a GJB holdup”
[stevie – MPC-one, mellotron, that one red keyboard u always see pro keyboard players with]
18. continue & intensify
In 1983, New Afrikan anarchist revolutionary Kuwasi Balagoon was placed on trial, having been captured after an unsuccseful expropriation. He refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of the proceedings, nor did he recant his or the Black Liberation Army’s actions. He used the time allotted for his defense to explain himself to the people as authentically as possible, and to mock his petty and incompetent captors. He observed that, quote, ‘legal rituals have no effect on the historic process of armed struggle by oppressed nations. The war will continue and intensify, and as for me I’d rather be in jail or in the grave than do anything other than fight the oppressor of my people. We have a right to resist, to expropriate money and arms, to kill the enemy of our people, to bomb, and do whatever else aids us in winning, and we will win. The foundation of the revolution must rest on the bones of the oppressors.’
19. les anges passent
N’aies pas peur, ça va venir
à travers le lit où je travaille, à travers le viseur de fer,
à travers le lit où je travaille, l’ange passe.
one angel shot from my forehead like a bird.
one angel shot from my forehead to fight where i could not move.
you have not seen me because i’m almost no one. i have not seen you because my
legs cannot escape the door, head cannot escape the bed, eyes cannot escape the dark
à travers le lit où je travaille, à travers le viseur de fer, les anges […]
là où j’vais, personne me suit
[Izzy – guitar, stevie – guitar, bass, mellotron, vocals, cap – MPC-one, Ana María Rodriguez – shakers, Ana Díaz Sacco – sampler]
20. here comes the rain
i’m in the frozen sunlight, drinking up ash and fire,
here comes the rain, miles wide, days and days, roll out the grey wheel.
over the gold horizon, a soft light to cover my eyes.
here comes the rain, cry and cry. wild grass cracks up the sidewalk.
take what your eyes require: wet on wet, gray on gray.
here comes the rain, roll out the wheel, smash the past under the gray steel.
where the ashes pass the river, where the ocean scatters ashes,
i can see another past in the water.
moi j’ai pas peur
here comes the rain, roll out the wheel.
[Penny – drums, Izzy – guitar, Lee – vocals, cap – vocals, stevie – 12-string, sampler, bass, synth]
Side D
21. turning fire
in the future we’re a turning fire.
leave us alone when we are dancing. leave us alone when we are sharing life.
leave us alone when we are crying. leave us alone when we’re a turning fire.
leave us alone when we are dancing. leave us alone when we are sharing life.
leave us alone when we are mourning. leave us alone when we’re a turning fire.
leave us alone when we are laughing. leave us alone when we are dying cold.
leave us alone when we are hiding. leave us alone, we’re a turning fire.
[stevie – MPC-one, vocals, mellotron, Penny – synths, cap – vocals, MPC-one, Lee – vocals]
22. simple as that
Michelle – ‘so I went in the bedroom, and I said well, y’know, cash up front. And all of a sudden he started getting really rough. He didn’t know that I, right in my leg warmer I had a knife. I said to him ‘I’ve got a knife at your back. Stop. Or I’m gonna use it. … So I stabbed the man four times, and then I stabbed him once in the hand. Then the man, he believed me, that I was serious. I’d been abused so many times, somebody’s getting what they deserved. He had to be taught a lesson. It’s as simple as that.’
[stevie – mellotron, MPC-one, drums, cap – MPC-one, vocals, Lee – vocals]
23. life is good
my life is good. my life is like a rose. my life is closed and has so many corners.
life is good. life is real. life is like a rose.
my life is real. my life is still a crime. my life is like a rose.
my life is long and casts so many shadows.
my life is good. my life is like a rose. my life is soft. my life is dark and lives off what you offer.
my life is real. my life is watched by angels. my life is like a rose.
my life is closed and has so many corners.
life is good. life is real. life is like a rose. love is life. love is real. love is like a rose.
Marilyn Buck quoting Mario Benedetti – ‘We sing because it rains in the trenches, and we are militants of life, and because we cannot, or we will not let the song become ashes.’
[stevie – sampler, vocals, mellotron, bass, cap – vocals]
24. Dora
This article recounts the suppression of the nascent trans rights movement in 1930s germany by fascist paramilitaries, as well as its roots in colonial atrocities perpetrated by germany and the ‘united states’.
in 1933, the dominant fascist party of Germany carried out an attack on Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Research. Hirschfeld was an internationally renowned physician and sexologist whose life’s work involved advocating for what would in modern times be described as homosexual and transgender rights. his strategy entailed the rigorous cataloguing of gender and sexual variance for the purpose of representing subversive genders and sexualities in the dominant heterosexual media and institutions of western europe. to this end, he represented marginalized genders and sexualities in the most clinical and respectable framework possible for a european academic audience. his life’s work drew heavily from an exhibit he attended in berlin that was itself a war crime: in 1896, to buttress his academic research on the universality of homosexuality, he interviewed captive Africans who had been kidnapped and displayed in human zoos by colonial authorities. a common sight in the contemporary ‘united states,’ these colonial atrocities among many others provided the foundation for modern european science and medicine, the mutually constitutive counter-insurgency tactics of fascist Germany and the united states, as well the respectability approach to legal rights for european sexual and gender minorities on both sides of the Atlantic. Hirschfeld insisted throughout his life that ignorance was the root cause of the mistreatment of subversive genders and sexualities, and that knowledge and awareness were the most effective response. He himself was gay and Jewish, and endured physical attacks during the course of his efforts prior to the armed fascist attack that destroyed his institute.
In the decades before the attack, Hirschfeld successfully argued for Berlin’s municipal authorities to exempt transsexual patients from local crossdressing laws on the basis of his scientific and medical research. A transsexual could theoretically present a so-called ‘transvestite pass’ to an arresting officer and thus mitigate harassment.
Dora Richter resided in Hirschfeld’s institute and was employed therein as a maid. Dora Richter was the first known european to receive a vaginoplasty through a surgical procedure performed by an institutionally recognized medical doctor. she was likely murdered by fascists over the course of the attack on the institute. The fascists used Hirschfeld’s extensive written records to arrest and exterminate virtually the entirety of berlin’s aboveground community of subversive genders and sexualities. It is difficult to know for certain the extent of militant resistance to extermination, simply because almost no one survived. It is however safe to deduce that militant self-defense was isolated and underdeveloped enough to be crushed quickly and utterly.
in the occupied territory known as the ‘united states,’ the most visible strategy to counter the renewed vigor of domestic fascism in the year 2023 is the representation and respectability approach that was so disastrous for Hirschfeld and fatal for Dora Richter. Although the colonial government never ceases to foment a climate of transmisogynistic humiliation and violence, it is not uncommon for white trans women to leverage enduring ties to the colony for wealth, celebrity, and sometimes protection at the expense of Black trans women in particular. Many white trans women participate enthusiastically in the colony’s elections, where their right to exist is a subject of debate. More broadly, most trans women in general rely on the state for medical care and fundamental recognition, while the state is always withdrawing or threatening to withdraw its meager and contingent protections. Since many trans women must register with various state bureaucracies to access life-saving medical treatment, the state has a readily available registry of gender subversives awaiting the next administration to inevitably assume the mantle of overt fascism.
behind a veil of torched roses, a wall of screaming angels. The past and the future make contact in the bodies of trans women. Insurgent genders re-emerge from the corners of history, while our own searching hands reach from the future to pull us into new worlds already scorched by our monstrousness. Trans autonomy is inevitable. Trans autonomy is imminent. Trans autonomy has already happened. Trans revenge is the force of life.
[Lee – keys, stevie – keys, mellotron, Penny – keys & drum machine]
25. isn’t it
now that you know this is your part, isn’t it hard to play?
now that you know this is the game, isn’t it hard to play? isn’t it?
isn’t it hard? i really thought the past was over. i guess i never got this far.
isn’t it hard? oh god, isn’t it hard? isn’t it hard to play?
[stevie – MPC-one, red keyboard, mellotron, Lee – vocals, cap – vocals]
26. tired all the time
I’m tired all the time and i dont know why. someone take this memory from my mind.
people with their tear-away faces, they always back the liar. and i’m tired all the time.
i close my eyes and I cry in silence, wounded by my own foolish heart.
i’ve longed to tell you darling. whispering these faraway curses, i’ve willed this world to burn.
and i’m tired all the time.
on the road to heaven, roses shed their silver teardrop river.
you’d offer them a rag to cry in, but you’ll have not one thread to give them.
i’m tired all the time and i dont know why. someone take this memory from my mind.
i’ve sheltered in such faraway places. i can’t escape the fire. and i’m tired all the time.
Marilyn Buck – ‘and I think that, that if, if we’re committed to struggle, then we’re committed to life, and we’re committed to that never dying.’
[Ray Aggs – violins, cap – vocals, Lee – vocals, Penny – drums, stevie – guitar, octarack, reface, mellotron]
27.
box of dark roses
are the roses folded in the valley
where the plums are broken on the orchard floor?
dark like the roses in a box i’m
sleeping like a new moon.
all night the sky is weeping. all night my footsteps shrink the night.
my clothes are only wasting time. all night the roses cry.
are the roses open in the valley
where the plums are broken on the orchard floor?
dark like the roses in a box i’m
sleeping like the end of the world.
all night the stars are weeping. all day my footsteps make the night.
the lake is only frozen time.
all night the roses cry.
are the roses folded in the valley
where the plums are broken on the orchard floor?
dark like the roses in a box i’m
sleeping like a new moon.
dark like the roses in a box i’m
dreaming of the end of the world.
[Lee – vocal, cap – vocal, stevie – guitar]
Mastered by Carl Saff
LP’s pressed at Smashed Plastic, Chicago IL