Music That Informed This Work
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Camae Aweya AKA Moor Mother
Dreamcrusher
“My whole work is to fight against the erasure of black people, the erasure of poor people, the erasure of black women, the erasure of women."
“I'm bell hooks trained as a sniper / Sandra Bland returning from the dead with a hatchet” - By The Light by Moor Mother
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“The way they house us, the way they make home a dream, a wish, anything but a human right. […] That’s Circuit City, being forced to work for a machine that’s so big you can’t even see it.” - Aweya speaking on her play Circuit City
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Pharmakon
“To be well adjusted in this system is to be oblivious and unfeeling. This is for the rest of us, who understand that chaos, madness, pain and even self-destruction are natural and inevitable responses to an unjust and disgusting world of our own making.”
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"The nature of existence and our sentience is chance, owing nothing to anything. Humankind is of no special significance to the universe. (Despite all our scrambling rejections, we cannot transcend all of our instincts — just animals, lost in a confused dream, where mankind is real and at the center of everything). We are each nothing but a single, short-lived cell in a vast organism which itself will one day die. If we accept that the only true claim sentience gives us is our tiny sliver of time, it opens us to revel in it, to make CONTACT. When we pick up on transmissions between the private rooms inside our heads and the flesh of our vessels, when thought escapes its isolation and is seen, heard and understood. When our mind uses the body in order to transcend and escape it! The moments of connection/communion/CONTACT, when the veil is for a brief but glorious moment lifted, and we are free. Empathy! EMPATHY, NOW!"
"There are songs about Octavia Butler because I’m thinking about the politics of representations. There’s songs about being trapped in your body, but being trapped in your body while people are watching you."
"I want to feel like I’m not the only one in the room willing to take a risk. I’m doing some work on stage, but the audience has to do some work from where they are, too. I want people willing to go to the edge with me.”
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Death Grips
“Feel just like I look to you/Gawk at me all you see is you/Spit on you, spit on me/All we know spit must be us/I break mirrors with my face in the United States/I break mirrors with my face in the United States/I don’t care about real life, I don’t care about real life/Too many mirrors wear my face/These broken mirrors take my place” - I Break Mirrors With My Face In The United States by Death Grips
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Chelsea Wolfe
"I made an album in 2006, just because I wanted to make something, I knew I wanted to do music. But after I finished it I realized it wasn't really the music that I wanted to make. I think, Ira Glass, said something like, you have to do something and fail, or you do something because you know you want to do it even though you know it's not good enough yet, or maybe you haven't found your own voice yet, and that's how it was for me."
Writers That Informed This Work
Sinister Resonance The Mediumship of the Lister by David Toop
"Sinister Resonance begins with the premise that sound is a haunting, a ghost, a presence whose location is ambiguous and whose existence is transitory. The intangibility of sound is uncanny – a phenomenal presence in the head, at its point of source and all around. The close listener is like a medium who draws out substance from that which is not entirely there."
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The Undercommons Fugitive Planning & Black Study by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney
"It ends with love, exchange, fellowship. It ends as it begins, in motion, in between various modes of being and belonging, and on the way to new economies of giving, taking, being with and for..."
"We owe it to each other to falsify institution, to make politics incorrect, to give the lie to our own determination. We owe each other the interdeterminate. We owe each other everything."
"Form is not the eradication of the informal. Form is what emerges from the informal...It didn't come from nowhere. If it came from nowhere, if it came from nothing, it is basically trying to let you know that you need a new theory of nothing and a new theory of nowhere."
Mitski
"And did you know the liberty bell is a replica/
Silently housed in its original walls/And while its dreams played music in the night/Quietly/
It was told to believe"-Mitski Last Words of a Shooting Star
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"I tried my hardest, for I'd never learned/God's very simple and love shouldn't burn/And I would've offered you all that you yearned for/But I was still waiting for something to earn/
What is that quiet of snow in the night?/The dark rings with white noise/As you stand and drown/Maybe it's all of these snowflakes, screaming/A choir of mute/As they brace for the ground"-Mitski Square
Simone White
"Serial Imposition"
"Persistent Manifestation"
"Material Presence"
"Why isn't poetry enough for you?"
We ask, why isn't dance enough for you?
Emergent Strategy by adrienne maree brown
”I show something I’ve been hiding, and hope I’m still loveable”.
Nepantla: An Anthology for Queer Poets of Color edited by Christopher Soto
Some excerpts are available on the "Poems of Inspiration" tab! Read, read, read!
Lingua Ignota
"How can you doubt me now?
How can you doubt me?
How can you doubt me now?
How can you doubt me?
Every stone on every mountain
Is etched with my name
Every vein of every leaf of every tree
Is slaked with poison
If you rise up to heaven
I'll turn the sun to blind you
If you sleep deep in hell
I have chains to bind you"-Lingua Ignota Do You Doubt Me Traitor
Please listen to this song don't be afraid of the length, trust me!
Night by Etel Adnan
"The Indian will not cut the grass because, he says, That's his mother's hair, and I assured him that I will not break a stone because that might well be his spirit's house."
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"Memory is within us and reaches out, sometimes missing the connection with reality, its neighbor, its substance."
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"If I didn't remember that I am, I won't be. We can also say that the universe is itself the glue that keeps it going, therefore it is memory in action and in essence, in becoming and being. Because it remembers itself, it exists. Because it exists, it remembers."
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"Dear soul, am I only because I have been?"
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"Reason and memory move together.”
Metaframes That Informed This Work
Texas, Kansas, Massachusetts
Identity
Gender
Gentrification
Crying on stage
Industrial music
Noise music
Expectations of performance
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Dance Makers That Informed This Work
Expectations of dancing
Making music is dancing
Writing is dancing
Drawing is dancing
Talking is dancing
Folding socks is dancing
Screaming is dancing
Packing your bag is dancing
Crying is dancing
Maria Hassabi
Okwui Okpokwasili
Lulu Obermayer
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