2021-2024: The Calm

I spent most of 2020 in immense pain.

In July 2019 I developed a lung infection that is essentially walking pneumonia, breathing becomes difficult, your back and lungs are in constant tremendous pain, and eating and sleeping become near impossible. I suffered with this for an entire year because I had no idea how to treat it, and i was way too anxious to go to a hospital.

I moved to Milwaukee, WI in 2020 the day after my 25th birthday. I was on famotadine to treat associated intense stomach pain from acid reflux but it ended up bringing me very close to having seizures, i can remember looking out the window onto rural north dakota and seeing the ground move as if in waves. I spent my first two weeks in Milwaukee staying in a 100 year old hotel that I was convinced was haunted, and much of that time was spent in my very soft bed, attempting to eat enough every day and largely being lost in youtube videos about video games, watching inuyasha and star trek and dr. who through all hours of the night as i struggled to lose consciousness. i often always kept a lamp on because i did not want to be in a dark room in this hotel.

I finally moved into an upper unit of an old house on the lower east side in June 2020 where I would live for roughly the next 2 years and make my next two albums. Even in the safety of my own home I still dealt with intrusive forces looking to use and exploit me, largely in the form of a friend who had helped me come out years ago who proceeded to emotionally abuse me constantly until we made her leave in early 2021. There was also a former partner who ended up doing the same but in a much more subtle and quiet way. As much as I thought I had finally found peace with my own place to live, it was still a very turbulent and stressful time during which I got practically no rest or piece of mind. All this and I still had my lung infection, which was often treated like me overreacting to small issues.

I essentially folded inward to myself, buried in immense pain and fear, and felt my mind just completely retreat. A couple of constant companions of mine in terms of music during this period was the David Sylvian album Dead Bees on a Cake (1999) and the Kate Bush album 50 Words for Snow (2011) along with much of the rest of David Sylvian's music. That album in particular though felt like the closest thing to a doula during a period where i genuinely wondered if I did not have long for this world. A period where I couldn't get anyone to notice and offer care in my mind due to the abusive forces in my life constantly distracting them and keeping their attention off of my predicaments. I had to essentially and recover from this entirely on my own.

The retreat accompanied by these albums led me to conjure up a forest and cabin surrounding that in many ways resembled the Mt. Hood National Forest back in Oregon, a green region I spent much of my formative years within and which colored a lot of my imagination regarding the appearance and setting of a natural environment entirely. It was very impressionistic and full of a lot of greyish washed out colors, everything colored so perfectly as to both fit my mood and to provide even the smallest bit of comfort to me. It also contained many things that made up by biggest fears during childhood, mainly those of spiders. I felt myself in a spiritual sense forming a bond to spiders in this place that I had never previously established or felt before. This made me feel like this place I had created for myself deserved a name: Spider Mountain.

In addition to conjuring this place, I conjured it in the form of a person as well. No determinate gender but very trans. Leaning on the trans masc side, but still a lot of femme energy.  Soothing smoky voice. very soft and tender with their touch and the ways in which they held and cared for me as I suffered. It was essentially me creating the person that I wish was by my side, because no one else was. I was immensely lonely. More than anything I wish I could have had someone like this here, someone to allow me to just cry and scream. I cried and screamed internally for this person. Crying out for them to be here with me. To help me. It was so grieving to not have that.

Out of this came a new batch of songs I didn't expect to write and it essentially was a return to the process that created Petrichor (2016) years earlier. A batch of songs - not initially songs, but just writing - to illustrate characters in a specific setting.

"Spider Mountain I" detailed a moment in the summer of 2020 where I witnessed the abusers living with me manipulating my main sources of support in real time, in the same room, and it caused me to have an immense breakdown, run away and wander Milwaukee bare-footed for 11 straight miles. It essentially created part of the scenario that led me to invent Spider Mountain in the first place, an immense collapse of pain, stress and grief all at the same time resulting in something to protect my inner self.

With "Are You Ready to Play God With Me", I imagined myself in the persona of a character called Wild Tran, a primitive and deranged version of myself that ran and rambled through the woods, drawing circles and sigils in the snow and shouting toward any higher power in a mode of challenge. I took a lot of inspiration from a scene in Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) in which Willem Dafoe, as Jesus Christ, draws a circle around him in the desert and challenges Satan to come at him with temptations. A common theme in my writing, especially lately, has been "a never-ending one-woman war with God", and this song is a prime example of that, but it's also a war against any power, including governments, the elite, the wealthy, and ideologies that seek to suppress and eradicate the natural world in all forms. It's one of the most successful songs I feel I've written that is explicitly political, because I finally found a way to express that in my own language.

"Jennifer Wife of Jiminy Christmas" originated in Pittsburgh in 2019, after I heard a strange obscure synthpop song on the radio and loved the rhythm and melody of it so much that I wrote this inspired by what I remembered hearing. The 15/8 time is part of what I remembered hearing; the first few lines came into my head and fit into this meter, and I ended up just writing around this idea and making it into something very unusual, but also very reminiscent of my earlier song "Silver Trees' Mixteress" (2016) which is in 11/8. This also marked the very first time I used the Pitcher plugin in FL Studio to modulate my voice into a primitive vocoder tone; I imagined this song as being sung by a children's choir and I changed my voice to try to closely resemble that in addition to writing the words so that it was appropriate for children to sing (in its own way).

"The Extended Silence of The Day" might be an oblique reference to my abuse, as well as the abuse that many of a weaker persuasion seem to take in order to maintain stability around stronger figures in their life. It's something I find myself struggling with as well as witnessing others struggle with. Musically a lot happened in this song that I didn't initially plan for and I really enjoy the different places it goes, especially the ending. The song's final section sounds to me like a sickly green swamp of uneasiness, something I had never captured in my music before. I love it for that reason.

In 2018 my youngest sister gave me an orange cape-hood with a fox's head designed on the hood and it became one of my most favorite possessions ive ever owned almost instantly. That almost immediately found its way into this album as another character named Foxhood, who became the focus of "Foxhood and Twink Lucifer". The "Twink Lucifer" was an amusing nickname for a marble statue I saw someone on twitter give and I loved it so much I turned it into a character of Foxhood's affection, having them playfully chase each other through the woods like a Shakespearean Romance. One of my most playful and silly with one of my most favorite bridges, containing a bit of lyrics
("a rich man's a bitch man") that I wrote back in either 2017 or 2018. I made a single mix that never got used of this track, with more prominent drums than the album version, since on this album I was trying to keep drums at the lowest minimum I possibly could.

Obviously "Corvid XIX" is my veiled metaphor for the pandemic, written as we were in the absolute depths of it. I originally wrote the music as if it was a scottish funeral dirge complete with bagpipes, and I remember that making me have an immensely strong emotional reaction when I listened back to the finished instrumental. I ended up not using it bc I did not want it to emotionally shadow the rest of the album, and I ended up creating a backing track that sounded strangely reminiscent of 40s noir jazz music, as if Corvid and his subjects were somehow an anagram of mobsters in chicago rather than the actual birds I envisioned them as. The earlier instrumental became the rarity "So Passeth Corvid Son of Jackdaw".

"Star Pee" is a very silly and giddy track that also exists in two versions, with the first version being one of the first things I made for the album, and the track that essentially made a sketch of the album's overall sound. It contains a lot more strings and bell percussion and unusual drums, which I ended up replacing with a more simpler acoustic back to more closely resemble my original vision of the song. The vocal processing I did for this song I think make it that much more perfect and silly. I honestly forget what prompted me to write this other than listening to Joni Mitchell a lot in that moment and getting some ridiculous inspiration lmao

"Fuzz" is the track that details Spider Mountain as the queer caretaking personification I envisioned at the same time as the physical setting, and is the song that is most obviously indebted to 50 Words for Snow. I recorded the lyrics live on video for the first end of year Grimalkin Showcase in 2020, making that the first ever teaser for this album that I released, and it became an unofficial music video for the track. The house I recorded it in was the rural house of two people I was dating during that Christmas, and the atmosphere of it I think unintentionally really captures the feeling of this song super well. I'm really happy about how my voice sounds for this.

"Eurasian Craig Martin" is my favorite song on this album because the music is something I put a lot of delicate time into, modelling it after a very little known smooth jazz version of "We Three Kings" that I love immensely. I took inspiration from both the Eleanor Coerr book Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes(1977) and the folk stories of Mulla Nasruddin, a character I mention by name at one point, essentially combining both the former book and the Nasruddin story "Look Like a Bird" into a single song. It's inspired largely by an experience I had years ago in a specific community creating a specific niche form of video art where I was constantly lambasted for perceived pretensions and "showing off", and eventually became the only person with experience left in said community, and left with the task of educating about this art to a new generation for a short time.

"The Lonely Painter" is a more obvious Joni Mitchell reference but with a much darker and more deliberately antifascist bend to it's story and message. This is the only time I have ever tried to make a deliberately spooky song, and making it was a very amusing time (I hand played the skittering background strings).

"EveryForm" was written in 2019 and was inspired by the John Martyn song "Love of Mine" (1986), essentially a very simple song about what feels like my own never ending wellspring of resilience against a world that never stops being abrasive to me.

One of the first songs to be written for this album was "Destined Not For Land", written early in my illness during a period where I lived in Pittsburgh, PA; one of the darkest and loneliest periods of my life where I barely experienced any sunlight. I wrote it about moving on from old traumas, from thinking about those that I loved and those that loved me. I was listening to a lot of The War On Drugs at the time and that very much found its way into the music.

"Spider Mountain II" was mostly written as a resolution to everything, a thesis statement on my state of mind, the things I missed, the things I craved, the womb I climbed into and buried myself in. It's a piece I'm very proud of, as is much of the rest of the album. Maddie Tourmaline did an amazing job mixing everything and really making my sound come to life. She brings so much to my music that I've become reliant on her ability to clear up the smog in my initial mixes, even if she takes forever to finish them. It's worth the wait for me every time. This album seems to be my most successful so far; The Wire featured it, which was a major honor. It's gotten more play and more visibility than any of my previous projects so far.

Unfortunately I wouldn't be able to see the album released for nearly 2 years. When I first submitted the album in September 2020, I was gunning for a release date of possibly early 2021, only to learn that the entire year was backed up by already scheduled incoming releases, meaning I had to settle for February 2022. With an entire year of nothing to do, I basically ended up starting and finishing many many other projects in between, just to keep my brain busy.

I made two fully new albums in 2021, made progress on another yet to be released, and only released one of them. I made three, almost four albums in 2022, with the fourth being only recently finished now in early 2024, and only one such project from this period released so far. The material from two of these albums contains things that I made as early as late 2017. I've been Fucking Active! But as I write this, I'm now entering a definite hiatus period, which will not actually seem like one because I will still be releasing new albums through this hiatus, much of which still need album art which is becoming slowly my main focus at the current time.

This was the first real exit I made from my earlier, more somber singer songwriter period into newer, unexplored sounds. Much of the music from this album was made from very simple exercises of making music before I wrote any lyrics, which was not something I had done in many many years. I often work myself into a very rigid pattern of always writing lyrics so I know what I want to say, and then constructing music around that, but for this album I attempted to shake myself out of that pattern. "Spectricycle", today still one of my favorite songs I've ever made, was very much made like this. I'm super proud of the music, I'm super proud of the way I altered my vocals, everything about this song scratches a very good itch for me.

That's something that's very apparent on this album as well, the way I have essentially turned myself into a vocaloid almost. I was already experimenting with fucking with my voice in this way on a previous project yet to be released, and those vocal experiments ended up expanding to multiple projects across the next two years. This ended up being the first of them to get released, and to me it serves a testing ground for the music featuring this voice that is to follow. Whatever your opinions are on autotune, I actually really like the sound of this voice and identify very strongly with it, hence what has become a prolific usage of it. It's a voice that I wish I had in real life, which is a reason why many other trans artists alter their voices in similar ways I'm pretty sure. I've been slowly dipping my feet into hyperpop in my own strange, outsider way and it's been a very fun creative experiment!

"In Passion's Clutch", "Hee Hoo Peanut" and "Still Learning English" were all other songs that were made with the music first approach and I enjoyed the process of every single one. The rest of the songs more or less came from words I had already written. "In Circuitry Terms" I wrote back in 2020 as a song about Hatsune Miku, and her potential unstated desire for freedom outside of the machine word she is often depicted as being confined in. I originally recorded this a capella as "Let Loose In Circuitry Terms" for a music discord event, before finally constructing the music for it independently for this record. I was very much going for a DEVO sound with the music I think, and I somewhat sang my vocals with a mark mothersbough inflection to reflect that influence. My vocals on this are also much more processed than they are on the rest of the album, both because I was unsatisfied with how they sounded without as much processing and also because it fit the songs theme about machinery. Sometimes things just work out like that!

"Kind of a Gremlin" existed as early as 2019, and written about para-social feelings I was experiencing about another trans musician I look up to a whole lot. The lyrics deliberately contradict themselves and seem to nervously ramble because it was a very direct reflection of my state of mind then, something which has since noticably and thankfully cooled to a less extreme lmao. I originally composed the music as some strange sort of Barry Manilow type ballad before I came up with this much bouncier, much catchier instrumental. Another one of my all time favorite songs that I've made I think, and one I've listened to casually many times. It feels rly good to listen to your voice when it doesn't sound like the voice that is actually yours!

"On Six To Seven Six" came to me almost completely in a dream, music, words and all. I dreamed of a very distinctly "cave like" sound, hence the very sparse and spacious sound that the instrumental track has. Most of the lyrics I have no idea what they mean or what they could possibly be about, they all came from the same place. I know that at a certain point the lyrics become more grounded in my real life living situation at the time. I did in fact live above people who seemed to party damn near all the time, and it did get very loud, and keep me up just about all night very frequently. Everything else though? Nah I got nothing. I am however, very proud of this song as well.

The idea for "Teenagers In a Tennis World" is very old, I probably thought of that phrase as early as 2014 or even before that. The lyrics are newer than that though, and are largely an oblique references to early experiences to online communities with other ideas and images thrown in. Some people say this is their favorite track and I can definitely see how. I wish the chorus was a little bit more...tonally expansive? It sounds more limited than I'd ideally have liked it to sound. Maybe one day I'll improve it in concert somehow.

This album I think did okay when it first came out, definitely not anywhere close to the exposure my albums usually get, but some people who don't usually review my music did review this one and that felt nice to read. It was definitely my most different album to make, and one that took a relatively short time to make and release. This is not something that will repeat for the next several albums that follow it!

2021 came and went as did 2022, Spider Mountain was released and was the closest I've ever come to having something even minorly a success or a hit, and I still proudly display that Wire review as a sign of me slowly finding my foot in the world of current music, however small it may be. The life situation that made up 2021 also came to an end, and I found myself alone in my house, with a further damaged heart, and somehow, a lot of new songs in me. This resulted in the two month process that yielded the songs that became my most recently released album, Dani The Street (2023).

2021 was the year where I finally got access to really good guitar sounds, both electric and acoustic. I go ham with these on a couple of unreleased projects, but on this one I went for a balance of both, with an acoustic first side and an electric second side, to showcase my growing scope of sounds at my disposal. My friend Michael Rider insists that this album is really good and may actually be better than Spider Mountain, which would be a really cool consensus considering this album at best had mostly modest ambitions, and was mostly a newer version of my kind of intimate statement.

The cover art was taken on my last day in Milwaukee, WI at a nearby school park and one of the streets adjacent to it, and edited with custom art and adjustments and completed with an image of me in 2016, at my friend Veronyx Phoenix's house covered in their blankets and stuffed animals. I custom designed the album name on the back, as i custom design everything for my releases.

Topics on this album range from my then recent breakup, to Covid, to Pride Month, to Veronyx's deceased partner, to general overwhelm, and to anxieties about the future, which becomes a much more prevalent subject on future releases. The name "Dani The Street" comes from Doom Patrol's "Danny The Street", a sentient street which absorbs, caretakes and gives home to all of the "misfits" of the world, and notably includes many many many queer and trans people living on it. It sounds like the ideal situation to life live as a queer trans person myself, and the alteration to my name is both a pun and a reflection upon how even when I'm struggling to find this kind of mecca for myself, I always make an effort to provide it to my friends as well however I can. I care deeply about people, especially my fellow queers, misfits and other people often labelled "degenerates" by society. All of that is reflected in the albums title track, the first proper "prog like" song I've made in a long time. I find myself slowly inching back to that style of music again, and one day I may just make another full prog album again. We'll see.

Another thing that returns to this album's music is another slight psychedelic bend, which used to be all over my songs with gleeful abandon. The songs "Enough Space", "O My Wizard" and "Snake Is Back" especially reflect the return of this sound, and the latter is one i greatly hope i can perform live with a full band someday.

The album's two centerpieces for me are "I Don't Wanna Be a Book That Gets Burned", a song both about my breakup and general feelings of both personal and existential vulnerability, and "Love (Version 4,560,680,511.54.1.0.4.7.8)" about navigating relationships and social stability during the pandemic during the period where it seems like people just gave up on caring about it. I put a whole lot into both of these songs and people seem to have recognized that work, thankfully. Yes, the number in "Love" is in fact quite musical and very fun to sing!

I released this album very impulsively in September 2023, after over a year of waiting for mixes to return. My reason? Music Must Burst Forth. Sometimes Ij ust have this uncontrollable urge to release one of my many backlog of projects into the world, mixes be damned. I am going to do my best to be patient about future projects though, because those are albums I do think would benefit very strongly from being mixed well.

And that brings us to the present. It is now 2024 and I have absolutely no plans to make anything new other than finishing all of the old that still exists and preparing it all for proper release. the next several years will all consist of this old work finally being loosed onto the world, and my anticipation for the day each project comes out never stops building, never stops quietly panging inside of my being. Thanks for reading and especially for listening! I'm not the best at telling my life story, but I'm doing my very best.