Album Notes: White Knuckle Sonnets
rut: a rendition of a song originally written by someone real special to me named K. Sugar Hill. she currently plays with The Skinny String Band:www.myspace.com/skinnystrings
*symbiotic grace: inspired by my friend Rachel Jay Dot’s zine (& her life in general), May Cause Dizziness. check it out at: www.strangerdangerdistro.com
*tattered screen doors: dedicated to alex fischer and Ayah Young (cuz you know why and I think yer real strong), and to my mama, Elisabeth Yomtob-Wilson, who passed away in the summer of 07.
*cuddling/container of sound: makes my body feel Inhabited…Lived In. Seeley Quest sings harmony on this track, and Berkley Carnine plays violin. Both of them are great cuddlers.
*esophagus microphones: a piece about change/ letting go. it morphed into a soundscape at a time when i was grieving and listening to way too much Sinead O’Conner (don’t ask).
*praxxxis: the cheeziest love song i’ve ever written. it’s about my friend Praxxxis, and all the different kindsa ways you can love someone.
*placerville blues: inspired by Bessie Smith’s, Black Mountain Blues. i wrote it about the town I grew up in. Berkley plays violin on this track too (so dreamy).
*folds & handles: about the process of growing to love our bodies in the face of daily contact with a culture built on sizeist, ableist, ageist, heterosexist, white-supremacist, capitalist, patriarchal standards of beauty. BTW: it’s important to deconstruct the ways in which the US Medical Industrial Complex turns our bodies into sites of struggle by legitimizing such a culture! Some good books: Bodies Out of Bounds: Fatness & Transgression by, Jana Evans Braziel & Kathleen LeBesco, The Obesity Epidemic: Science, Morality and Ideology by, Jan Write & Michael Gard, & The Obesity Myth (includes a critical analyses of the BMI) by, Paul Campos.
*muscles, bones & calluses: about how hard my dad worked (and still works) to keep us alive when we were kids. don’t let the title mislead you: really, he’s a big softy. Berkley plays violin on this track too.
*troubled sound: a soundscape inspired by Samantha Dorset’s zine, Troubled Sleep. She’s a brilliant writer & I feel real lucky to have her in my life. you can get her zine through Planet X Zine Distro. K. Sugar Hill is on this track working magic on her accordion.
Recorded by Annah
Mastered by Mark Pistel
Album Notes: Collection of Crutches
Pollinate Me: Um, this song’s about crushes. And pollination. &, &, &…
Manslaughter:
As a name for experiences of socially situated political violence, Trauma forges overt connections between politics and emotion. And music as a medium, can help return the listener to the pleasures of sensory embodiment that trauma destroys.
-Cvetkovich
This song is about several generations of women who’ve been incarcerated for murdering their abusive husbands. It was written after reading Cvetkovich’s, An Archive of Feeling.
The sentimentality of the London Bridges melody is linked to the tropes of my own childhood— and for many of us, childhood may be a period in our lives when we may’ve witnessed the most violence.
By archiving these women’s names in relation to each other, a single coherent narrative is created that works to connect people’s histories in order to develop perspective about a larger social phenomenon. Archiving trauma can create points of unity between people, allowing for larger inter/intra-cultural solidarities to form…
Emo Envy: This is a song about desensitization and apathy (both default coping mechanisms many of us have developed in order to function in this world, as well as manage/diffuse our own histories of trauma). Sometimes I feel jealous when I’m around people who aren’t as numb as me— but bearing witness to other people’s strong emotions can also be a source of inspiration that reminds me it can be safe and healthy to re-inhabit my skin and Feel sometimes.
Stairwell: This is a song about stairwells, anxiety attacks, and an ode to liminal spaces (the spaces in between two things). Stairwells (the in-between spaces between 2 floors) hold the bodies of buildings together, just like fascia (the fibrous tissue between our muscles and bones) work to holds our bodies together…
Do Not Resuscitate (RN SONG):
This is a song about how much I love my RN friend, and also about how much respect I have for the kinds of radical, subversive activism done under the radar by brave folx working inside of capitalist institutions (ie: Medical Industrial Complex, Academic Industrial Complex, etc).
Voyeuristix: This is a song that explores the politics of voyeurism and femme identity. As a female-assigned/femme presenting person, I am commonly the object of the heteronormative (cis-male) gaze. Spectatorship in this context is an explicit act of violence— it requires the stripping away of complexity and context from my body for the purpose of nonconsensual fetishization. The politics of being a femme presenting performance-artist then, become interesting. Inviting an entire room full of people to direct their gazes toward me, harbors both dangerous and liberating potential.
The performance of this song usually entails two people standing on stage behind me the whole time shooting photographs of the audience (with super obnoxious, bright flashes). Still by default, the reality is that I, the performer, am the one on display…but the process of queering the gaze through disidentification comes into action.
If this sounds like a buncha academi-dork blabber, check out Jose Munoz’s work on Disidentification. He flushes out the idea that spectacles can work to offer the subject a space to situate itself in history and thus seize social agency. Through the performance of this song, I am essentially asking the audience to witness the hijacking and queering of identity, by watching me work with/resist the conditions that dominant culture generates about femme-gendered people.
Mississippi Arms, Acetone Rain, & Archive of Memory: these three songs are pieces meant to pay homage to the art of resurrecting & performing memory. They document the conversations and stories of past partnerships, and through music, invoke historical connections in a form that will last long after we (our bodies) are gone. In the process of mourning the shifts and changes our relationships undergo, its been helpful to remember that the reason we engage in each other’s lives at all, is to inspire, challenge, and encourage each other to grow.
So, you both—
Thank you. You have moved me beyond measures,
beyond melodies, harmonies, and words.
Ribcage Squat: This is an old soundscape I wrote shortly after my mom passed away in July, 2007. It opens with her outgoing voicemail message. PS: I often send text messages to my mom’s old phone # when I miss her real bad, and whoever has that number now is super nice to me. They always seem a little confused, but somehow seem to get it.
Track #9: lyrics inspired by/in dialogue with a communiqué written by a Loved One
Cover Art by Molly McIntyre
Violin by Berkeley Carnine
Recorded by Annah
Mastered by Mark Pistel
