This post has been a bit overdue, but reassimilation into the workforce and contending with various sickness (physical and mental) has put it on the back burner. The Kangraven // Drommusik tour with Dungeon Acid was a success and I want to extend my gratitude to all the promoters, artists, friends and attendees who supported us. We happily took a risk in forgoing the conventional status quo of “Touring DJ Culture” by handling a weeklong tour entirely by ourselves using a network of DIY underground and experimental promoters who showed us nothing but kindness and care. Extra thanks goes to Tomek who helped us with design for the tape and tour posters, Outlandish Press for their risograph printing, Stephanie Tsong for helping us print T-shirts mid-tour on short notice, the promoters in Chicago who supported us despite the show being shut down (more on this later), and to my Subaru who held out for the week-long loop through New England, Appalachia and out to Chicago and Nashville – she deserves another oil change and me figuring out how to swap out my brake pads and rotors before the winter.
Our tour was made up of gigs that (with the exception of New York- an excellent evening of programming at Good Room as part of the Interzone Festival) occurred in spaces largely outside the “industry standards” of the Club DJ Industry. The spaces ranged from the basement of an ancient drag bar (Boston) to community supported spaces for DIY art and music (Providence, Nashville), repurposed industrial spaces (Pittsburgh, Chicago) and small bars that were important spots for local music community across genres (Huntington, Columbus). This drove home again and again the importance of communities (and artists within them) establishing and maintaining space in an age of hyper capitalist gentrification. As the monoculture of tech-and-finance capitalism spreads through cities, communities who fall outside the margins of a rich, white and professional class are deprioritized, de-resourced and eventually forced out of spaces and regions where they were able to establish themselves. Although under-40 white people with art degrees are in some ways affected by this phenomenon, a cursory amount of self-awareness would acknowledge that this group often (though not always) has seemingly more mobility within this matrix of urban development winners and losers, more access to resources, and more privilege within the violent enforcement of capital by police, and an ease assimilating into the transitional phases of “urban renewal”. At the same time, the true adversary that displaces people from working class neighborhoods (be they service industry laborers, retirees, people of color, artists, queer people, and any amalgamation of these identities) is the shared class interest of real estate owners, development financiers, city officials and business owners whose material interest lies with attracting money from outside the communities within which they exist. All of these people’s class interest is dependent on forcing others out, and swallowing up resources to prolong their wealth. In a thin sliver of experience, one can see how electronic music would fall on the side of an authentic creation that amalgamates the qualities of life in the working class from various experiences or angles – and that it’s poignancy for decades resonated within the experiences of these communities. Despite it’s cooptation and accessibility for a professional and bourgeois ruling class – largely a function of monetization, nightclub-alcohol industry and luxury commodity in a sanitized environment that the Club DJ Industry willingly participates in – a humble established DIY space (or a repurposed space for the liminal zone of illegal music) is a form of resisting the grinding homogenization of development in similarly vital ways that a tenant union, a community meal kitchen or workshop, art and craft space or harm reduction resource site can embody. Our experience in Boston – a 70 year old gay bar nestled precariously in the heart of a corporate office high rise district – was a liminal thrill which saw promoters Sysex Club (dogged by the high turnover of DIY venues) utilizing the basement of the bar for a night of off-center dance music and live visual art while an upscale clientele (a sea of bachelorettes) enjoyed a raucous drag diva revue. Nashville saw us ending our tour in a packed crowd of high school ravers, for whom the all-ages DIY space DRKMTTR Collective has become an outlet for subcultural exploration.
One notable moment of tour – perhaps in some ways a climax? – came from our gig in Chicago – which was busted by the landlord and police about an hour into the party (Is this the “rave nostalgia” that everyone keeps talking about?). The promoters for the evening had taken special care to curate an excellent underground party, and were unfortunately and sadly hamstrung not only by the interruption of capital into space, but by negligent warehouse tenants for whom the safety of attendees and quality of the evening was less of a priority than their cash-only bar and rented ATM with $7 service fees. To see our friends who worked hard on setting up the evening be used as fodder for a v-necked rentmaking cash-grab was infuriating, and the fact that the show was shut down – despite it being a financial setback for the promoters and a let-down for attendees – hopefully has kept the warehouse tenants from being able to continue leeching off the network of artists and promoters just trying to find a space where real estate is at a premium. Again, huge thanks go out to Glenna, Lexi and Jeremy and their crew for their hard work, dedication and friendship.
One of the greatest opportunities of tour was being able to travel by car with Jean Louis, and for us to soak up various regional Americana along the highways and mountain roads of the Eastern US soundtracked by around 70 different albums. We had a fairly strict “No Techno” rule in the car which allowed us to decompress a bit between evenings of dance music. Highlights include the 45-minute edit of Cabaret Voltaire’s “Yashar” which we enjoyed while seeking out a certain color of Dickies canvas work pants in the Pittsburgh suburbs, a roadside encounter with a peacock at the Hare Krishna intentional community New Vrindaban while blasting Amensia Scanner, listening to John Giorno’s manic recitation set to 1970s proto-post-punk as we passed the “Hell Is Real” billboard, an hour of sparse and shattered IDM by Markant whilst driving through a seemingly endless plane of identical windmills, a fraught storm-laden pitch-black run into the mountains reaching Nashville set to the dub-funk vignettes of Holger Hiller, and stopping at the Mothman Statue in Point Pleasant, WV, at sunset while listening to The Specials at max volume. I have assembled a Youtube playlist consisting of one track each from about 65 albums we enjoyed and embedded it below for people’s curiosity:
Despite tricking my brain into a largely lizard-stimulus state after so many nights of music, sleep deprivation, vegan food and mindless driving, depression and dysphoria still have a way of creeping in. Battling with feelings of not wanting to be inside a body, with feelings of absolutely hating ones appearance and spending days avoiding mirrors at the rest stop so you won’t trigger some state of alienation isn’t easy – carrying those feelings on the road is an absolute curse. Feeling absolutely alone in a room full of people is a hollow way to spend an evening – I am deeply thankful for the friends that kept me somewhat grounded into reality. Tangentially, I realize upon writing this that it’s been roughly two years since I undertook being medically recognized as transgender – something which has allowed me access to hormone therapy and the medical debt that comes with it. Ironically, the past two years have also seen me stop identifying with social constructions of “femininity” as an indicator of womanhood – something which has often caused me to have to defend my reasons for being on HRT to medical professionals, while having to defend my hesitance / ambivalence / depression-and-debt-induced aversion to taking my hormones to people in my personal life. Although I am currently working a day job (as well as existing in the music scene) as an out-transgender woman, the validity of my identity feels up for debate constantly by strangers and acquaintances (although it may just be paranoid narcissism to assume anyone is actively debating anything about me).
Weirdly, I feel as though the medicalization of my identity has made me more and more hesitant to put all of my chips into the pathways for being considered “a woman” that conventional understanding of transgender narrative dictates. Yes, it is true that I consider myself nonbinary, though I wonder how much space I can hold without being second-guessed as a butch woman / masculine transgender lesbian within the cultural signifiers of non-binary existence. As such, it’s become an increasingly unusable identifier for my own existence. Perhaps understanding myself as an agender transwoman or the hopelessly pretentious, conceitedly academic and pedantically unfuckable “post-gender” would be close – though all of these seem still contingent on the existence of gender for validation in their “lack thereof” or “beyond” posture. My own views lie closer to gender nihilism / abolition – something which I feel speaks to the longing of destruction of gender from which I wish to remove myself (and everyone ideally, or at least the people I care about). I don’t know if I’m ready to amend my “transgender woman” status with the ideologically-heavy “gender abolitionist” qualifier outside the confines of the handful of people who read this here. But that level of annoying ideological contrarianism can only be contained for so long, so I’m sure I’ll be pissing people off with it somewhere soon.