A bewildering exploration of psychedelic electronics, cathartic noise and underground club sounds from the Voluminous Arts founder.
Gavilán Rayna Russom’s multifaceted artistic career spans four decades. Her first paying gig, in 1990, was DJing a mix of acid house, industrial music and Jane’s Addiction for her high school’s senior prom. In the years that followed, she’s made psychedelic noise with Michael Kelley and Lightning Bolt’s Brian Chippendale, created kosmische and disco with Delia Gonzalez, built synths and toured with LCD Soundsystem.
Russom’s solo catalogue is the kind that you can easily get lost in for days at a time. In the late 90s, she was making “freakout electronics” as Paper Eyes (“too queer for the noise weirdos and the ill-bient scene and too weird for everyone else”), and in 2009 launched the Black Meteoric Star alias as a way to explore her interest in dance culture.
Since publicly coming out as transgender in 2017, Russom has released an album on Ecstatic called The Envoy (inspired by sci-fi writer Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness) and launched her own label, Voluminous Arts, “to support and disseminate works by boundary pushing artists.” The label has released several projects in 2020 from Russom alone, including a new Black Meteoric Star album, Disco, and Secret Passage, which draws on the time Russom spent in her teens hanging out in the abandoned tunnels of Providence.
This Fact mix from Russom, which comes shortly after the launch of Voluminous Arts and spans almost three hours, is a bewildering exploration of psychedelic electronics, cathartic noise and underground club sounds. It features tracks from several of Russom’s aliases past and present, as well as from Scraaatch, Speaker Music, Hiro Kone, Suzanne Ciani, Sonic Youth, Swan Meat and The 83rd.
Russom has shared a poem to encapsulate the mix: “…Across the expanse, where rivers wanted to flow, where now a sheet of rain comes, cutting marks, marking within marks. Marks in mating, times in making, wetness in waiting.”
Find Voluminous Arts at Bandcamp.
Tracklist:
Gavilán Rayna Russom – ‘A Moment’s Pause’ [Voluminous Arts]
Gas – ‘Untitled (Zauberberg)’ [Mille Plateaux/Kompakt]
DAF – ‘Untitled Selections (Produkt der Deutsche Ameikanische Freundschaft)’ [Warning Records/Mute/Bureau B]
Edge Slayer – ‘Street Harassment’ [Interference Pattern]
Orphx – ‘Lecture 17’ [Hospital Productions/Mannequin]
King Vision Ultra – ‘Sub Medi Wretch’ [Trevorshaus]
Paper Eyes – ‘Catalyst Circle’ [Voluminous Arts]
Gavin Russom – ‘Let the Bones Speak’ [Lux Rec]
Scraaatch – ‘I Could Think If It Was Just Chimes’ [Self-Released/Halcyon Veil]
Sonic Youth – ‘Inhuman’ [Neutral Records/SST]
Suzanne Ciani – ‘Concert at Phil Niblock’s Loft 1975’ [Finders Keepers]
Nnux – ‘Salida’ [VAA]
Wetware – ‘When You Respond’ [Bank Records NYC]
Speaker Music – ‘Emergent Trauma Response’ [Self-Released]
Caroline K – ‘Tracking With Close-ups’ [Earthly Delights/Klanggalerie]
Swan Meat – ‘Render/Trigger’ [Self-Released]
Mr. Incognito – ‘Wheel of Fortune’ [Rat Life]
The 83rd – ‘Fight Back’ [Sermon 3 Recordings]
The Scissor Girls – ‘Weird 09’ [Load Records]
Hiro Kone x Roxy Farman – ‘MVMNT i’ [Self-Released]
Throbbing Gristle – ‘Dead Bait’ [Spurt/Get Back]
Micha – ‘Fog on the Ocean’ [Self-Released]
Gyna Bootleg – ‘Wraith’ [Self-Released]
Mania D – ‘Track 4’ [Monogam/Pure]
Cienfuegos – ‘Want it All’ [Bank Records NYC]
Ass Baboons of Venus – ‘Bad Hygeine is Good Birth Control’ [Stingy Banana Records]
Haitlin – ‘Valley’ – [Trevorshaus]
Target Shoppers – ‘Dance of the Kittens’ [Destroy All Music]
Bookworms – ‘STE114’ [Self-Released]
Paper Eyes – ‘Organ’ – [Ecstatic Recordings]
MC Dellacroix – ‘Preta’ – [Self-Released]
group A – ‘Labyrinth’ [Mecanica]
Russell Ellington Langston Butler – ‘Synth Library 3_20_19’ [Self-Released]
Dollar Brand Xahuri – ‘The Dream’ [Enja]
Speaker Music feat. Syanide – ‘Of Our Spiritual Strivings’ [Planet Mu]
Harry Pussy – ‘Untitled’ [Planet Records]
Telepathic Children – ‘Invisible Lover’ [Self-Released]
Black Meteoric Star – ‘Freaks Only’ [Voluminous Arts]
Sisterhood of the Good Death (Rayna x Natt Maat) – ‘Animal’ [Voluminous Arts]
Krzysztof Penderecki – ‘To the Victims of Hiroshima’ [Phillips]
Gavilán Rayna Russom – ‘Still Learning, Still Growing’ [Voluminous Arts]
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