Bowing to spirits

It’s been 20 years since I burned a handful of self-released CDRs for Way Their Crept —which I almost named Big Teeth in a nod to the demons these songs described.

Where it led to still feels like a gift, and a surprise.

For its 20th birthday party it is available again on vinyl, on kranky— with new design, and an extra track formerly only on the Type vinyl. Original mastering intact. Still has the old photo my dad took in the 60’s on the cover.

This means it’s the 20th birthday of my imprint YELLOWELECTRIC too, so named because of a stubborn accident—I wanted to have a nameless label and so would only write my email on my releases. Later when I was forced to register a name in order to contract digital distribution, I had to use my email handle because it was the only consistent thing already written on each release.

Sometimes I am reminded that folks don’t know I have my own label— I can’t imagine my artistic identity separate from it. YELLOWELECTRIC formed simultaneous to the music and pattern-work that I still make now. Way Their Crept was the very first thing I put out, and the branch drawing on the cover was the first of that drawing type I made. There are over 20 releases on the label now, including the recent repress of my album with Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, the Raum album ‘Daughter’, and a few represses of cherished recordings by other artists like Stephen, Dadamah and Roy Montgomery.

Copy of the second round of Way Their Crept CDRs I made—damaged when the basement where I kept most of my original early releases flooded in 2010.

I was immersed in culture of small labels— including the resurgence in pressing short runs of vinyl, and CDR/tape imprints— in the Bay and Portland in the early 2000s. Almost didn’t even know there was another way…mostly noise and experimental, which I still relate to and feel more connected to more strongly than any other genre. I am thankful to the friends, and labels in that scene— centered in independence, and existence outside of the main capitalist vein— for inspiring the confidence to self-publish, and retain ownership of most of my music rights over the years. Thankful to have witnessed and been supported by many small record stores, DIY venues, labels and distros that don’t exist anymore like Aquarius, Volcanic Tongue, Root Strata, Collective Jyrk…and psyched that some of these places and things still do exist— The Lab, ATA, etc.

Friends of mine joke that these anniversary represses feel like something that should happen only after you’re dead but for me, it’s a mark that I’m still alive—it’s celebratory. Sharing the vulnerability of recordings and performance, even when it terrified me. Doing my best to hold fast to artistic goals and to try to create a relationship with work that feels sustainable. I remain a near 10 on the tortured artist spectrum—but it feels pretty good to have experimented on this strange planet, to have remained largely independent, to have run my own imprint for this long, and at 45, to simply be here.

Thankful for and proud of all my friends who made it through too, and miss like hell those who are no longer here; thankful to kranky; thankful to you.

<3

Way Their Crept arrived in 2005, a year not unlike 2025 in at least one big way —a farcical president, G.W. Bush, had just started an unbelievable second term. Dejection and depression, anger, frustration were palpable among my friend group. It was a dark time. Racism and anti-Muslim sentiments surging. Deep disillusionment over the Iraq War, the nightmarish spectre of Katrina and her aftermath…

I had returned to the Bay from a brief, disorienting time in LA a few years prior determined to rededicate myself to creating work. The momentum felt like pushing off the back wall of a swimming pool. Brimming with contrarian energy, I cut off all my hair, sold my fashionable clothes and high heels, and swiftly went broke. While I worked on finding new income—eventually landing in the field of care work for adults with developmental differences—I ate dumpstered bread and cold cans of beans, and moved into an old (haunted) warehouse between the Vietnamese neighborhood and the train yards in Oakland — above an artist’s iron-welding studio— after a short while living under a layer of drywall dust in a warehouse called Lobot (short for Lower Bottoms) in West Oakland close to the Bay Bridge. Traded one breathing hazard for another I guess.

Cops used our neighborhood as a shortcut across town, often speeding past our house at 100mph, and we got used to car break-ins. One housemate started leaving her car unlocked at a certain point, and would just politely ask whomever was sitting in her car smoking or digging through the dashboard to head out when it was time for her to go to work.

That time feels inseparable from a space and scene immersed in experimentation in art, and music. I lived alongside friends from Yellow Swans, Eats Tapes, Kiyomi Gork, Eva Saelens (one half of the s/t Poison Tree split), Adee Roberson, and so many more rad artists over the years (Suzy Poling, John Orlando, Gaby Wolodarski, Osa Atoe, etc.) Kiyomi had a circuit bending studio in the back. We let our friend John Blanco live for free in the middle of the main space in a cargo net loft he’d hung from the rafters. In winter it was so cold that we mostly all huddled in the kitchen cooking together.

Jeff Stratford, Gabriel Mindel Saloman and Kiyomi Gork in the dining area…

Musician Bonnie Mercer (left) with my dog Rosie and a friend in the main room of Huffin.

Huffin Halloween party, think this is in my room, which was painted bubble gum pink; I zoomed on my right eye in a xerox and used it for the cover of He Knows.

A weekend buffet meal offered by a nearby Thai temple was a regular haunt for all of us (John Orlando/Meyer, Vice Cooler, Pete Swanson, George Chen and John Blanco.)

Mama Buzz (pictured: Mark and Gabe) was a cafe in a neighborhood with a ton of little galleries and venues in Oakland. On nearby corners were Rock Paper Scissors, a queer bar called the White Horse that opened in 1933, The Stork Club, 21 Grand, and an accordion shop run by one of the original members of Survival Research Labs.

We had all moved there with purpose, to start a warehouse that would serve as a dedicated artists’ work space. There was so much still happening in Oakland around that time with DIY galleries, venues and art collectives. The city had not yet cracked down. Lobot hosted shows, so did Grandma’s Haüs and Sixes, and some friends and I had started an art and zine collective called Rock Paper Scissors (still around) in an old storefront across from the gallery/cafe Mama Buzz, on Grand Avenue.

We promised that our warehouse, which we named Huffin House in a nod to the fumes from the welder down below, would not devolve into a party-zone or slovenly mess, though of course in the end we did have some very fun parties, and make a number of giant messes— like the time the entire house trimmed a farms-worth of weed, so much that the house was filled with cartoonishly huge trash bags of the stuff, and you couldn’t escape the smell, or the resin. Even though I wasn’t trimming myself, and didn’t smoke, I remember feeling lightly stoned for the better part of a month.

That kind of fiery ethos was a good match for me at the time. Reacting against something, and channeling impulsive energy have always helped give lift and open new doors. I’m not great at repeating myself, or scheduling, but I do like surprises, and surfing creative waves of energy that come in—often related to emotions I’m going through/struggling against, or coming from some place outside of me, some other thing entirely.

I find it interesting to listen to what’s already there, to simply let it through.

At this time in my life I was still just beginning to process my upbringing in a cult, and separation from my family as a child— multiple layers of dissociation. It felt like I was hauling a dark energy around with me so heavy that it had taken on its own sentience. I was still having demon nightmares regularly, during which I experienced seizure like pain in my spine, and had begun to wonder if perhaps when I was alone and vulnerable as a child, some spirit had crept in and lodged itself inside.

For the scariest period of my chaotic childhood I had spoken almost exclusively to ghosts, and the spirits of inanimate objects and asked them to protect me. In the haze of a fevered dream I saw their dark shapes darting above me in the rafters. They were nightmarish but I told myself I wouldn’t fear them. I let them know I was their friend and offered to help them if they would watch over me in return. I told them they could use my body as a physical tool, or a gateway. I bowed and apologized if I bumped into a wall, a rock or a tree, and as I wandered among them, told them I would always honor them as family in return for my safety.

Talking to grass, probably, age 8

Around the time I began recording Way Their Crept, in mid 2005, I was studying gamelan with an Indonesian teacher in El Cerrito thru the ensemble Gamelan Sekar Jaya. One has to memorize the songs because gamelan music traditionally isn’t written out. The music is learned by listening, and watching. I would record our lessons on my mini disc and then play the ghostly chiming melodies over and over in headphones on the BART, walking to my job in San Francisco on streets loomed-over by tall grey buildings and still peppered with abandoned lots. The first couple of tracks for WTC I also recorded to mini disc, before I figured out how to use my broken Tascam 4-track cassette recorder…and so my walking soundtrack alternated between haunting slendro flourishes and demos of this new shadowy music.

Making detailed black and white pattern work started around this time, too. An alien art and music pouring out in the same breath. The branch/web drawing on WTC is (as mentioned) the first I made in that style. Here’s another from a little later:

Starting to make these drawings was part of an unknotting, a pivot towards asking art to take up less physical space, and to function as stress relief— prior to that I’d made mostly horror inspired bloody or neon painted trash installations and videos…doing that work had touched my stress and nightmares but somehow amplified the pain and confusion, made it worse instead of alleviating it.

I needed sound to be the same as the new drawings I was making, pure expulsion of fevered energy, a blood letting. Washed over by engaging with this heavy disorientation, it felt like a torrent of spirits rushing through me as one song after another appeared. I felt no sense of artistic ownership to the music that arrived, thinking of it more as a visitation that was allowing me to be its door; not definable or knowable, not to be looked at directly. To express that relationship, I chose a band name that alluded to a faceless arranger of things, though it also quietly spoke to the sadness of my past. [bowing to the spirits]

The songs were devotional, an offering to whatever dark shape it was dragged behind me, a hovering density that sometimes woke me at night, tossed me from my bed onto the floor; thanking it for being my most powerful lifelong ally even as I knew it could drown me underneath a tidal wave. Profoundly intertwined.

How often our demons dance beside us, loving, in strange melody; a funhouse mirror, warning us of danger, and helping us transform.

I grieved our connection, while praying to remain close forever. Aching to both find belonging, and obliterate myself inside this unknown world.