soft noise

9 December 2022

I lost my mind a bit this year. not that that is an unusual occurrence. everyone lost their mind a bit in 2020. 2021 embodied the reverberations of collective destabilization. this year, my off-kilter mental state started with a strike. my co-workers and I had been striking for ten weeks, reaching an agreement with our employer only after a nerve-wracking winter filled with insults and threats. the strike was a heartening display of a solidarity; it demonstrated material webs of support that subsist social and professional life.

at the same time, the strike was disassociating. it left me feeling disconnected and disinvested in my work. the progressive rhetoric of my workplace rang hollow. the veil of community fell flat. the struggle for something approaching a living wage and fair working conditions highlighting the enormity of social change still needed to afford dignity to everyone.

maybe I just needed a break. going on a tour of the south, east, and midwest seemed like a change of pace. I invited in music as a different lifestyle, one focused on creating art, building friendships, and holding space together. the tour was like unfolding my arm to see how far I could reach: a test of extension. I couldn’t know what I was capable of until I tried. along the way, i saw different ways to live and gather together. i enhaled whisps of persons I could become. i heard echoes of who I’d been.

my parents have been puzzled by my hard turn to music these past two years. It is at odds with my bookish tendencies. i’ve always been one quicker to criticism than action, preferring the comfort of detached reflection. even though I’ve loved music since my teenage years, i often ruminated on the music itself, erecting a separation between the visceral performance and my internal world.

noise music, emo, folk-punk, and ambient helped overcome this posture. i enjoyed being consumed by volume, throttled by blunt lyricism, given hope by a naïve political vision, left swaddled in texture. when i began trying to write something closer to songs than improvisions or soundscapes with “craigslist scammer” and “see you around”, i needed to channel the sounds that had given me presence. i pursued an emotional clarity expressed in the gnarled noisy edges. both are short tales of losing my mind yet again, falling for scams and false friends, being a bit too naïve and giving a bit too much of myself. but neither is a cautionary tale. instead, both allow me to embody a resolved character: the mark falling in love with the scammer; the too-cool-for-you-type unbothered by others insults.

when performing, the audience rarely sees you. instead, they see a phantasmagoric assemblage of your feelings, their expectations, and the atmosphere. you are a ghost animated by the desire you and others exhale into the world. each performance haunts who you become.

all of my songs deal in specters. “last christmas” and “dark pillars” reanimate conversations, mistakes, and words left unsaid. the phrase “divorced sorority christianity” from “last christmas” amalgamates comments bouncing from the back garden to the living room, their trace rhyming in the absence of place and persons. the admission “i’m saying the words to stay close to you” in “dark pillars” a realization emergent from a story about cast iron skilled shared during a snowed in afternoon. music is a way of marking the past, extending a lifeline through time to commune with old spirits.

so i have lost my mind. believing in ghosts and time travel. and i had lost my mind before, standing in the cramped bathroom, above the obsidian tiles, a handful of hair, a knife sawing at my overgrown ends to form a misshapen bob. “my knife haircut”—a severing from the past to embrace the present and move into the future.

and i will lose my mind again.