2. Vibrant Sheen

When this song was first being written I had only been dating my boyfriend and life partner Joel for two years, although we had been friends and collaborators for many years before that. It’s now been eight years. I was making a song where a synth arpeggio’s speed was being controlled by the pitch of my voice, and only triggered when I sang. There was something magical about singing with this system I built that also felt coy and flirtatious. The words that started emerging were about being perceived by my partner, and the intimacy of being perceived by him so fully and in such an exposed way, creatively and sensually. There was still some newness and uncertainty around our relationship at the time, so it became a love song honoring and capturing where we were at that moment in time.

The title was inspired by the way I originally performed this song. I was singing seated on the floor, holding onto a silver metal bowl that I peered into and then as I picked it up to turn it in my hands, it would trigger a sample and vocal effect during the choruses. Sitting under stage lights while holding the bowl in my hands cast a glow around me as well as the whole room. Although I don’t perform it the same way now, that magical glow still resonates throughout the song.

My favorite line: “I could show off how well I know our secret understanding.”

3. Value

This song had the earliest origins of this collection, started in 2018. Shortly after moving to Oakland in 2018 I met Peter Hernandez (Julius Smack) at a show they played with Wizard Apprentice, and I really loved both of their sets. I had already been visualizing making music with more theatrical live elements and it was really inspiring to see how both of them in their own ways had created their own engaging live performances. Peter asked me to come take part in a residency they were doing at a place in Oakland called 2727, where all invited musicians were composing a song for a compilation titled Open Source, that would come out on his record label. We could only use Peter’s synths and equipment that was set up there to record and compose the song. There is a different version of this song that exists in a more raw and fixed recorded form on that compilation. In 2021 I decided I wanted to figure out a way to play this song live, so I came up with a way to use some of the sampled synths from the original recording, but to play them back live by using a stone tablet and a chisel. This live version is the one I rerecorded in 2022 for this album.

I wrote the lyrics for this song from an encounter with a dear friend in Oakland, during my first six months at grad school. This friend used to identify as an artist, but due to various reasons, making art/music wasn’t able to be a priority in their life any longer. One evening when we were hanging out, they admitted to me that they were worried that I didn’t value them and their friendship as much because they were not currently pursuing art/music. I was saddened and shocked to hear this from them, and it made me realize how much we all question our value as humans or friends, and what it means to question whether we have worth in a capitalistic society. I wrote this song for my friend, as a way to help assure them, and myself, that your worth is not tied up in the things that other people can perceive or judge about you. It is the unseen things like love, and caring for yourself and others that has the most value.

My favorite line: “What goes unseen means everything.”

4. My Inner Rest

This piece was the first written for the album, and was my first foray into creating a visually engaging performance for voice and live electronics using gestures and props. This exploration informed the whole rest of my time in my MFA program, as well as my current artistic pathway, and for many reasons also became the name for the album as a whole. The name My Inner Rest comes from the outsider artist Madge Gill, whose work I encountered at a museum in Lausanne, Switzerland while on tour in 2017. Gill believed to have been creatively guided by a spirit she called, “Myrninerest” to complete many mediumistic works. I had been longing to reconnect to my own creative spirit, and the idea of finding her or summoning her was an inspiration that stuck with me and felt urgent to explore. I decided to use a hand mirror as a creative prop to gaze and speak to my inner self. What comes out of this conversation is a voice of uncertainty, expressing self-doubt and questioning my self worth. The song and lyrical form

expands to a realization of needing to accept myself as I am, and find healing and strength and accept love and help from others in order to find my creative spirit again.

In the live performance I have two bowls, one with water in it where I wash my hands in, then I take some of that water and bring it towards the other bowl. In that bowl I drop water droplets into it which each droplet triggers a note on a sequencer I have programmed. The droplets symbolize tears falling into a basin, simulating crying as a way of releasing emotion. During the time of writing this song I had been having a very hard time crying, which was unusual for me, as it is usually a very healing expression for me. So I made the piece to do a simulated falling of tears in order to play bittersweet and magical synth sounds.

My favorite line: “Will this applause assure me enough?”

5. Wash Away

This is an interlude that follows the song My Inner Rest. In 2019, I went on a tour where for half of the shows I was playing an experimental electronic set around the USA with my partner Joel Skavdahl. My Inner Rest was the only song from this album that was done and ready to perform at that moment in time, so we performed it together, and we often had a transition out of it that became this piece, Wash Away. This recording is taken from a live performance we did on that tour together, one of my favorite times that we did it. A lot of our 2019 set was improvising together and then also playing some of my songs in a unique arrangement that will never exist the same way again.

Although I am now just playing these songs mostly solo, it was really fun in the early days of making these pieces to have Joel play with me. This interlude song is a special reminder of that time and felt important to include on the album. The live recording was done on voice memos and then transferred to microcassette.

6. Abandon

This song was born out of writing the piece Vibrant Sheen. Out of writing a beautiful love song came the feelings of anxiety and self-doubt again, wondering if the relationship would last or if I would be abandoned, as it became titled. However the most powerful part of this song to me is realizing my own self determination and to not feel powerless in a relationship. That if things are falling apart and I am not valued in my relationship that I always have the power to leave.

Because Vibrant Sheen was originally written with these two big metal bowls sitting in front of me, for Abandon I wanted to fill the bowls with water and then send sound into them with two surface transducers stuck to the bottom of each. I sent a changing sine tone into each, along with random sampled delay of my voice. When I hold the bowls and move the water around, it changes the sonic quality of the sounds in the bowl by filtering and finding different resonant frequencies. At first, Abandon was always improvised, yet eventually lyrics stuck and a structure

formed during the recording process in 2022. I was forced to commit to lyrics and a melodic structure for the recording and then since then try to recreate it as close to the recording as I can. I have often written very moving melodies just over simple drones, and this was a fun way of doing that with more interactivity and physicality by holding the bowls of water while singing over them.

My favorite line: “If my heart is just convenience, don’t expect me to stay.”

7. Willful or Self-willed

I wrote this song as a way to stand up for myself against historically being too submissive and trying to please people to avoid conflict. In this time of my life I was finally learning to stand up for myself, even if it didn’t make me a likeable person. I had been in a relationship that ended where upon reflection I realized how much control I let them have over my life, to an unhealthy degree. I also during grad school realized how much approval and validation I sought from my professors, and realized how much I had also sought that from many other people in my life who I felt held power or control over me in some type of way.

Writing this really helped me find the part of myself that doesn’t need approval or validation in order to be myself and to follow my own path. It is still a struggle to fully believe in myself and not need to turn to others for approval, but I realize the more I am able to do that, the more I am able to be my truest self and not a compromised version of myself.

My favorite line: “In my life, is there something more ripe?”

8. Golden Sun

This is an interlude I made for live performances that I ended up liking so much that I put it on the album. It takes an ascending arpeggio that gets warped by being recorded onto a microcassette player that had speed issues, so the speed is subtly changing the whole time. I was really delighted with how this turned out as it was just a little experiment I was making that ended up really fitting the mood of this album. It felt playful and mysterious and felt like a good short instrumental piece to include in this collection.

9. Grasshopper

This is my favorite song to perform live, as it has a structure that has built into it a fair amount of vocal and sampling improvisation. It is never performed exactly the same way twice, and putting that element of risk into its creation live every time always gives me an adrenaline rush. I was inspired by the sound of insects like crickets and grasshoppers, and wanted to make a piece sampling my own vocals that could feel like chirping ethereal short percussive patterns. Also I

deal with my habit of always wanting to look back and long for and romanticize the past, and having to confront that and instead express a desire to be present and look ahead. There is a grieving for what could have been in a past relationship, and grieving people who are no longer with us. I wrote this song before my dad passed away, but it took on new meaning after his passing. The shadows of the past are only shadows and memories now, and instead of dwelling on them I have to learn how to forge ahead however painful or hard it may be.

This song and the next song Brightest Star ended up becoming a linked pair, as I connect them by introducing a lightbulb at the end of Grasshopper that is helping me play back vocal samples I record live. That performative aspect and gesture ends up driving the next song the album more fully, yet emerges at the end of Grasshopper.

My favorite line: “There is no turning back, what past shaped path is shadows?”

10. Brightest Star

This song is the only song on the album that I fully wrote after my dad’s death, I made it in 2021. A special gift that my dad had given to me and my sibling one year were these matching golden sun necklaces, because he said quote, “the sun is the brightest star,” and that is what we meant to him, it was a symbol of his love for us. After my dad passed, I could see more and more how he still was alive in me and in who I am, and how much for better and worse that I carry many of his traits and way of being.

Singing the phrase, ‘I am the brightest star,’ is also meant to serve as an affirmative mantra. Letting myself fully embody and believe that I am a being worthy of letting myself shine and be seen. That I don’t have to dim or diminish who I am, and that I should celebrate and believe in myself for exactly who I am. This song has a similar thematic vibe to Willful or Self-willed for the way it helps encourage me to be myself and accept myself for who I am. I think this song is visually one of the most striking pieces I perform live, especially when the lights are turned out, because I am playing with an orange colored lightbulb that casts beautiful shadows around the room, and thematically lifts and shapes the song in a magical way.

My favorite line: “I am the brightest star”

11. Suspended

The third instrumental interlude on the album, this is taken from the recording of the transition from my thesis piece in March 2020, right before the pandemic hit. This interlude leads into the last song on the album that uses only cymbals to transduce all the sounds heard in the recording. This piece is different resonant synth sounds being sent to five different cymbals in the Littlefield Concert Hall, that is a multi channel piece with panning felt better in the space itself live. This is a stereo recording of that 5 channel piece, and then transferred to

microcassette so that all of the interludes on this album are processed in the same way. I thought transferring the three interludes to microcassette helped distinguish them from the rest of the album in a nice way.

12. Violent Impulse

This piece is a very intense one for me as it deals with something that I have had a lot of difficulty talking about with anyone, friends and even many people who know me fairly well. In childhood I developed Misophonia, which for me involves an involuntary negative emotional reaction to the sound of mouth noises, people chewing, eating, and to the sounds of paper and cardboard rustling. As a kid it would make me scream or even act violently as a response to hearing these trigger sounds, and my family didn’t know why or understand what was going on. It took a long time and a lot of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy to get to a level where I can maintain it today while still being able to lead a regular life. I am still very bothered and still feel intense feelings of rage and distress to my trigger sounds, but I have learned better to emotionally regulate these involuntary reactions better than when I was young.

I had never made creative work about my Misophonia before, and this was my first attempt at it. I tried to remember when I first realized that my behavior wasn’t “normal” and attempted to understand it. I have tried to describe and tell others how it makes me feel, and how difficult it has been for me at times to exist among others normally, while dealing with this affliction. The words and melody came at the same time, and I thought that instead of playing my voice and other sounds for this piece through regular PA speakers, that I wanted to create a multichannel work where I sent sound through 5 cymbals arranged in the Littlefield concert hall. Sending panned sounds through multiple cymbals adds an eeriness, unpredictability, and harshness to the sounds and my voice that I felt helped tell this story of my suffering with Misophonia. By the end of the piece, metallic objects are set on top of the cymbals so that they are resonating harsher frequencies, in a way to recreate some of the tension and pressure build up that happens for me mentally when experiencing Misophonia.

My favorite line: “I could drown in a wave of fury.”