1/11/2024

I often feel like I’m not truly Alive. Dysphoria, depression, whatever name it takes, the results are the same. This sickening, smothering feeling of wrongness. Life isn’t all its cracked up to be, no matter what you’re stuck spinning your wheels in mud, sinking ever deeper. My body isn’t mine, my voice is all wrong, nothing I want ever seems to work out in the end. I’m alive, but it doesn’t feel like Living. A dead woman walking, going through the same pathetic motions day by day. Life is chaotic, messy, disappointing. Life is waking death. That’s how it feels. Every night spent alone, every day spent without purpose, every turn for the worse and disappointment. And yet, that’s not true, is it? What does it mean to be Alive?
Every time I get in a discord call with my friends. Every time I experience a moving piece of art. Every time I eat something delicious. Every time I step outside and feel the cool breeze on my skin, hear the birds chirping in the trees. Every time I put on a skirt and spin around. Every time a family member or friend expresses their love. Every time I take another breath I’m reminded.
I Am Alive. And I’m so fucking grateful for it.
Its easy to let the darkness of life overshadow the light, it’s hard to keep hold of something that feels so fleeting. Perhaps then, desperately grasping hold is counterproductive. Life is chaotic, transient. While that means all that is good will eventually end, does that not also ring true for the bad? Good times come and go, bad times come and go. Sometimes you’ll be so happy and content life feels like a dream, sometimes you’ll be so miserable you cant even open your eyes. Life is misery. Life is joy. Life is isolation. Life is connection. Life is an ever-shifting dichotomy.
Perhaps being Alive is not an absence of misery, or a surplus of joy. If life is a journey, is it not then a mistake to define it by one stop along the way? While you draw breath, while your heart beats, nothing is ever set in stone. To fight that transient nature, to reject or cling to your present, can that truly be called Living? Times may suck now, but this too shall pass. Better times will come, maybe not as soon as I’d like, but they will come. The good times will pass, maybe sooner than I’d wish, but they will pass. What option then is left but to keep on moving? To cherish the good times while they’re here, to shoulder the bad times til they pass. To simply draw another breath and do your best to make the most of it, however much or little your best may be. That, I think, is what I means to be Alive.
And the thing is, being Alive is not a solitary experience. Every person you meet and see are on journeys of their own. Sometimes those journeys enter twine, threads of fate woven together in the chaotic mess of Life. Some connections are negative, true, but its the good ones that make Life bearable. The burden of bad times is smothering alone, but together can be survived. The presence of those you love are what make the good times so sweet. To be Alive means navigating the transience of life, but it doesn’t mean doing it alone. None of us were meant to be alone. We bear each other’s burdens within reason, for it is only through this, through the simple acts of kindness and love in the face of both the worst and the best that life can offer, through being the light in the lives of others, that we can truly be Alive.
Maybe I’m just pulling pseudo-philosophical slop out of my ass, maybe I’m actually saying something worthwhile. I don’t know. Whatever the case, there’s one thing I do know.
The night is short, so I’ll keep walking. After all, I’m still Alive. I think that’s enough.

6/22/2023

I wouldn’t say a song or album has to be long for me to enjoy it, I greatly enjoy music of all lengths. That said there is a very special place in my heart for the long song. I don’t just mean like 8-10 minutes, though that is a very respectable length. You get to like 15 minutes though? 20 minutes? 30? 40? an hour? Now we’re talking. Of course a song being long doesn’t automatically mean I’ll like it, there are plenty of boring and overly dragged out songs out there, but there’s something so inherently gratifying to me about long music. Something that demands you sit your ass down and let it cook. I will now take this opportunity to gush about by favorite band Swans and you’re gonna like it. I’ll limit myself to specifically long song talk for now, though. We’ll be here all day if I don’t,
The 1986 live album Public Castration Is a Good Idea features longer, slower, hellish versions of various songs from their albums at the time. The lengthy run times of each song, and the album as a whole (about 70 minutes in total) make each song feel like you’re trapped in some sort of Quake industrial hell dungeon.
The 2001 album Soundtracks for the Blind, and the following live album Swans Are Dead from 2003, feature several lengthy tracks, but I specifically want to highlight Helpless Child, The Sound, Feel Happiness, and Blood Promise (the latter glowed up from a 4 minute studio version on The Great Annihilator to 15 minutes on Swans are Dead). Each of these are very particular in how they use their runtimes, as they each feature lengthy instrumental sections that. Make me feel emotions I do not have the words to describe. Which kinda almost defeats the point of talking about them but. You do not exit any of these songs the same person you went in.
Of course when talking long and Swans you kinda have to bring up the monumental trilogy they dropped in the 2010s, The Seer, To Be Kind, and The Glowing Man. Each of these titanic projects near or exceed 2 hours in total, and each contain numerous songs with runtimes freaks like me drool over. The song structure of these beasts feels pretty improvised (because they were in part written via improvisation during live performances I believe) but I mean that in the best possible way. These songs are maximalist rock music to the extreme, using volume and repetition pummel you relentlessly. An obvious example, To Be Kind’s Bring the Sun Toussaint L’Overture, features a single build that lasts around 7 minutes, going from soft and patient to a barely comprehensible cacophony. While these songs aren’t incapable of more subtle moments as well, and employ them quite well, its the immense builds that they’re best known for. The music on these albums is, for lack of a better word, physical. While it can be enjoyed (by me at least) in other ways, it’s best experienced via speakers as loud as your pathetic mortal ears can handle, allowing every note, every chord, every beat slam into your body like a brick wall. As physical as it is, the songs off The Glowing Man specifically are some of the only music I’d describe as a spiritual experience. Songs like Cloud of Unknowing, Frankie M. or the title track (also the closer Finally, Peace, but that’s only 6 minutes long so not exactly qualified for this particular ramble despite being one of my favorite songs ever), tap into a kind of spirituality via music I’ve only ever heard on this album. Humankind can never truly capture an image of divinity via art, but we can damn try. The Glowing Man is the closest I’ve ever heard a piece of music come to doing so. I don’t think that was necessarily the intent of the album, but that’s part of how I interpret it personally. Listening to this album is like a form of ritualistic prayer to me. That sounds very weird and pretentious I know but fuck you.
After that version of Swans ended, we got the 2017 album leaving meaning. Which was a much shorter affair (only 90 minutes if you can believe that, barely even an album!). The longer tracks on here take a much different approach to previous efforts. They aren’t trying to smother you with sound, rather the focus shifts to the subtle. Like I said, the previous lengthy beasts weren’t incapable of subtlety, in fact they boast surprising amount of it you’d never notice on initial listens, but the lengthy songs on leaving meaning offer a different kind of subtlety. Rather than volume, these songs focus more on texture and atmosphere. Sunfucker is freaky and probably the closest thing to previous Swnas epics. The Hanging Man and The Nub bring in this vaguely sinister, lightly unnerving vibe, with incredibly satisfying texture, and the title track is this beautiful, yet lightly haunting piece.
I don’t really have a point or concluding thought for all this. I just like long music, and I like Swans, and I like Swans’ long music, and they have a new album coming out tomorrow as of writing this and it has a song that’s over 40 minutes long on it and I’m excited and it got me in the mood to ramble. If there’s anything you should take away from this its that you should listen to Swans. Their music has fundamentally shifted how I look at music as an artform. Not in a “no other music will ever be enjoyable or compelling to me again” kind of way, but in a “my view of what is possible within this artform has been so greatly expanded that I feel like I can appreciate everything in it more than I was ever capable of before” kind of way.

5/29/2023

Music is an artistic venture that's been on my mind a lot as of late. Rather, lyrics are specifically. I've been taking a different approach with lyrics than previous efforts (different from what I've put out publicly anyway), trying to get more personal. A lot has changed in my sense of self recently (trans moment teehee) and its made attempts to write more personal stuff feel,,, strange. Songs I wrote mere months ago feel like they were written by a different person, ideas expressed in earnest feel fake somehow.
I tried to make a clumsy snapshot of myself at this point in time, a lyrical self portrait of sorts, but the subject changed always through the painting. All it really needs is a little course correction; tweak some lyrics, scrap a few songs, write a few new ones, typical creative process. But even so its got me thinking in pretentious philosophical ways I hadn't considered before.
Can a person really be captured in the art they make? The answer is no, of course, the most realistic paintings, the most high quality photos, no matter the medium there will always be something missing. Someone could write an autobiography the length of all the Wheel of Times books put together and details would still be missing. You could film every second of a person's life and still never capture the whole picture. Of course what I'm attempting is nowhere near as ambitious, but even capturing one moment in time in total is impossible. Even in the attempt, the moment passes and a new moment is born. Sometimes the changes aren't drastic so its negligible, but of course realizing you're trans is anything but a minor shift.
Words are a weird thing for me. When I'm speaking in the moment I never feel like I can muster the right words to truly express what I'm trying to say. Given time and a big word count I can get closer, but even when I'm satisfied I'll come back to it a day later and realize ten billion things I forgot to say or wish I worded better. This includes stuff like this very blog post this sentence was added last minute.
Lyricism and poetry is a whole other beast, though. So much more has to be taken into account when crafting every line, and some ideas are really fucking hard to compress down into a rhyme scheme and melody. Ideas of the self are especially difficult. How can I make a song to express an image of myself when I barely know who I am? How can I create a snapshot of myself as a person when I barely feel like I'm real? If I don't even feel like me, how can I know what that "me" even is and express it in any way, let alone lyrically?
I've tried expressing that very experience via song and while I've written some lines I'm proud of I still feel like I'm barely scratching the surface of what I want, what I need, to convey. Part of the whole point of this project is to take the ideas and feelings out of my shitty brain and express them outwardly. Even though only like 5 people will listen or care (hi friends :3) the fact that it was heard is what matters. The fact it could be heard. But I can't make something heard if I don't know how to say it. No matter what I do, anything I write anything I sing anything I create will just be a faint silhouette of the picture.
I guess all art is like that, though. A drawing or painting can never measure up to the image formed in the artist's mind. A novel can never contain every detail of the vast world an author imagines. A song can never fully convey the emotion of the songwriter/performer. But, these things still resonate. A novel can't contain the whole of fantastical world in the author's mind, but it can create a whole new one in the mind of the reader. Art doesn't end with the artist. Once its made, once its out there, while the version in the artist's head will die with them, a new version will be made in the mind of everyone that chose to engage with it.
I can never fully express myself in the way I want to, but I can express enough that whoever engages with my art can form an image in their own head. Maybe it differs from mine, but the details that matter will be there. I can never fully put myself in a song, but I can try. I can put fragments together that a listener can pick up and graft to their own experience. Maybe it isn't about making an image of myself. That's certainly part of it on my end, but it doesn't end with me. Maybe its about making a mirror. A mirror containing fragments of myself that can also reflect fragments of whoever chooses to pick it up. Even if I am the subject, my art will never ultimately be about me.
I feel like a pretentious ass even insinuating anything I make could ever have a serious impact on someone, but I hope it does. If I could impact even one person with my art the way other people's art has impacted me, that's more than I could ever ask for. Even if I don't though, even if everything I make is doomed to obscurity for the rest of time and even all my friends fucking hate it, maybe it was enough that I tried. Maybe that's all that really matters in the end. Maybe that fruitless yet meaningful effort is what art truly is. I don't know.