figuring it out

life updates, career updates, art updates. where i'm at these days.

It’s been about a month since my last transmission, so I felt like it was probably time to send out another. I don’t really have anything particular to say, though perhaps I will end up saying something by the time I have finished, which is usually what happens, typing away until I arrive at some kind of point. I should be doing some writing I am currently assigned that is actually for Work and will lead to a paycheck, but I have felt stunningly uncreative recently. My brain just feels stuck in the mud, and I find myself sitting, silently and blankly, for long stretches of time.

Part of this is just being in a period of transition: I moved from my home of almost 6 years a few weeks ago, to a new neighborhood which I am still learning the rhythm of. There are new bodega guys to cultivate relationships with, new coffee shops to become a regular at, and new avenues to wander until holes are burned into the soles of my shoes, as tends to happen far too quickly thanks to my fucked-up gait. There’s a novel thrill to getting to know a new place, but there is also a loss of familiarity that can be very destabilizing, and it is hard not to feel somewhat isolated in my new surroundings. It has also been many years since I was not the primary roommate in a house, the one who has been there the longest and pays all the bills and interfaces with the landlord, and I’m still in that stage of acclimating to an existing household environment. It takes time for me to claim a new space as my own, and I have a tendency to shrink myself in foreign surroundings, so the past 2 weeks I can’t help but feel like a little bit of a ghost in my own home. Though I don’t really know my roommates yet, it has been liberating to meet them just as a normal person, and not as the crazy bitch fresh out of the psych ward that almost everyone else in my life perceives me as. It’s also a tremendous source of relief knowing that trolls no longer have my address. On God, I’m never getting doxxed again.

The other major development in my life is that I’m officially gainfully employed. It’s nothing special, just my first normal-ass job in many years, but I am looking forward to getting out of my head and using my hands and actually interacting with other people on a regular basis after years trapped in the same bedroom. My career as a full-time freelance writer began in my old apartment, and perhaps it will end there. That remains to be seen. I don’t plan on hanging up my boots anytime soon, though, at least not entirely. But the circumstances of my year from hell have forced me to grow up and accept that it wasn’t working in the way I tried to convince myself it was. Probably the single biggest factor in my breakdown is just how precarious my life has been for so many years, residing inside a house of cards I was convinced would tumble at any time; it took longer than I expected, but it finally all fell apart. It’s a little bit like the end of Eden (2014), when our quixotic deep house DJ finally packs up the decks and resigns himself to the stable monotony of 9-to-5 life.

But I also think, in order to really find my voice again, I have to work a little more diligently to separate art from commerce and business from pleasure. Writing has been almost exclusively my sole creative outlet for the last 5 years, except it was hardly a means of expression, because I rarely ever did any writing outside of what I could be paid for. I felt stuck in a rat-race of meager portions, desperately taking any little-bitch assignment that came my way. I would like to be known for more than just album reviews, and I think that in order to do that, I have to get back to writing as an actual creative practice. Whether that means fiction, creative nonfiction, memoir, I’m really not sure — I have had a fully-formed treatment for a screenplay kicking around that I’ve been failing to expand upon for years, so maybe now is the time to take those kinds of projects seriously.

But I also feel like I have so much more that I need to express after this year, even if what I need to express or how to express it still slightly elude me. At the present time, I feel considerably more drawn to visual art and sound/music than writing, because there is so much that I don’t know how to say, but also that I feel like I can’t say. I shouldn’t knock myself for my lack of productivity, because I’ve still been staying in pretty active touch with my creative impulses in a way I haven’t done in a long time, it just hasn’t recently taken the form of writing. I started making these digital collages out of screenshots while I was very manic, as cover art for my SoundCloud uploads, but as the months have gone by, they’ve become their own separate practice, which is sometimes even more fulfilling than the sound collages themselves. I really like the challenge of finding materials that speak to what I’ve gone through, but there’s also a slightly illicit thrill to me in repurposing messages I’ve sent and received; it feels like a dirty little secret, for me alone to know the true context, and for you to imagine it. There’s a similar satisfaction to sound collages for the same reason; I love the idea of someone listening to my work and trying to figure out where I recorded a sound and what the source is.

After so many years spent as the outside observer who hangs my own interpretation onto art, it’s really exciting being on the other side of the equation, and seeing what meanings people find in my work that I never even considered, even if it’s only a precious few who actually engage. But it’s also just very funny—and almost a little bittersweet—that pretty much all of my creative practice now came out of mania. A stranger recently stumbled upon my sound collages and messaged to ask about my process and how I started making them, and it was a slightly surreal experience, because I basically had no other answer other than: “Um, well, I started recording everything while losing my mind a few months ago and somehow it turned into this.”

I’ve slowed down the rate that I’m recording and uploading collages considerably since the summer, and I would like to think I’m becoming more thoughtful and intentional with my process. I’ll spend a few weeks collecting recordings—fragments of dialogue and sound effects from movies and TV I’m watching, songs I hear in public places, noises that stand out as I’m walking around the city—and dump them in a folder on my computer. Then, I mix them together in Virtual DJ using my Numark controller, basically as if I was doing a DJ set, except I’m DJ-ing field recordings instead of songs. It’s intentionally a little bit messy, and I leave a lot of it up to chance; often times, I don’t even preview a recording before pressing play, and I just let the fates do their thing. But I feel like with each collage, it gets a little bit more cohesive, and I start to figure out more what exactly I’m trying to do with these things.

My initial conception for the Proselyte Magazine SoundCloud was to create my own deep-fried take on a radio show, but now I guess I’m just making basically ambient and/or noise music, although I’m still uploading my compositions to Spotify and Apple as podcasts, just because it’s an outside-of-the-box way to get my work out there. I always love using platforms and technological tools in ways other than their intended purpose, which I guess informs a lot of my approach to my sound collages, from the flagrant copyright violation, to the very idea of doing a DJ set with field recordings, to how I put them out there and present them to the world. At some point, I plan on selecting some of my favorite excerpts from these collages and putting out a compilation of them. I’m also working much more methodically and diligently on something that feels like my first real “piece,” a 38-minute long composition of sounds recorded over the last few weeks in my old apartment, which I have taken to describing as “Ambient Trap.” Too often, in any kind of creative work, I have a tendency to embrace a kind of middle-finger anti-perfectionism, releasing something in a rather messy state because I am too impatient to sit with it and really get it right. Increasingly, I feel like music or sound or whatever the fuck you want to call it is what I’m suppose to be doing, so I am trying to overcome the part of my ADHD that obstructs my ability to sit with something over a period of time, in order to really think more intentionally and thoughtfully as an artist. I’ve spent too much of my life creating in air quotes, treating my own expression as a tossed-off joke, and I think it’s time to take myself a little more seriously.

Here are a few of my most recent collages. If experimental music and/or musique concrete and/or field recordings are your thing, I hope you’ll consider taking a listen. If not, I hope you will maybe just consider taking a listen to make your bitch feel more worthwhile.

That’s all to say, I’m not exactly sure where I’m at with my writing career these days. I have a profile of a Swedish pop star coming before the end of the year, which I imagine will probably be my last published piece of 2024. In the new year, I’m easing my way back into reviewing music for a few places. I don’t exactly know what the fuck I’m doing with Proselyte Magazine right now, and I don’t want it to be another project that I started in a manic frenzy and failed to follow through on, but I’ve accepted that I just need to take some time to get back on my own feet and put on my own oxygen mask before I can really cultivate a platform of my own in the way I feel like I need to. My confidence has been rattled and my brain moves a little slowly these days, but I really hope I can still find it in me to pursue some of the ideas I had when I was manic, because before things really went off the rails, there were some who showed genuine enthusiasm for my crazy schemes and saw potential in some of what I was working toward. Also, I would just love to prove the haters wrong.

Though I am still unsure of the forms it might take or the frequency with which I will be able to do it, I know that I will still be writing, or at the very least still creating in some fashion. And I hope that you will still be reading, or listening, or watching. For now, the main thing is just continuing to stay alive.

Some brief housekeeping: I don’t think I ever shared my most recent piece of published writing, a profile of legendary professional wrestler Dustin Rhodes (son of Dusty, and better known to many as Goldust) for Texas Monthly. Also, many people have joined Bluesky recently, and you can follow me on there @ trillmoregirls (somehow the last account standing with the “trillmoregirls” moniker). I had to start my Twitter account over again recently after getting suspended for the second time in a year (and I also took a break for several months because of the insane levels of harassment I was dealing with), so many of you who might have followed me there in the past probably don’t follow me anymore; if you’re still planning to use the so-called “hellsite,” my new handle is @ 4realnadine. As always, thanks for fucking with me.