LA based artist Geneva Skeen composes with field recordings, digital presets, mixed voice and instrumentation, and both found and filmed video. Double Bind is her second full length album and will be released on Room40 in early November. In the lead up to the release we asked if she’d be interested in creating a mix for us. She was, and now she’s pretty much blown our minds.
This is what she has to say about it:
“I’m assembling this mix at the end of October in 2020, in my Los Angeles studio that doubles as an office that also is an integrated room in my house. I’ve been in this room for hours every single day since March, like most everyone else has been, respectively, across the globe. Some days the cabin-fever nearly asphyxiates. I escape by crawling out of my skin and into… the same clothes I slept in. Around August I started to resent this structure as much as I praise it. It houses my body and its petit nauseas: my personal triumphs in the crumbling remains of the professional institutions I’ve aligned myself with, a spectrum of love, kaleidoscopic heartbreaks, sleep and sleeplessness. My landlord tried to evict me in July (I won). I am lucky.
But then, there’s this cruel and indifferent body that contains my rented shelter. I’m talking about the United States of America. Here, now, at the end of October 2020, the coronavirus runs nine million cases rampant amidst waves of uprisings against relentless police violence against Black and Brown people, millions facing eviction, millions unemployed, millions without healthcare. There’s a looming fucked-up-no-matter-what election theater that’s played out under skies orange from raging wildfires, and the highest spike of firearm sales this indignant country has ever seen. What else am I missing?
Upside-down smiley-face emoji. Facepalm. Doomscroll. We can connect through the internet, I suppose. We pine for our friends and/or families—we’re alone together, with screen-induced tension headaches.
Memorialization and naming are tools to prevent unconscious cycles of repetition, of forgetting an atrocity. But the language again (always, for me) falls short, and I’m trying harder to use active voice. So here is a collection of songs and sounds that, to my ears, run the gamut of the shadows we are in, we have been in, we will always have, but do not have to replicate.”
Tracklist:
Backxwash—God Has Nothing to Do With This Leave Him Out of It
Tangerine Dream—Ancient Powerplant
Sample from Library of Congress (“Political Street Speakers and kids”)
Sample from Library of Congress, Tony Schwartz Collection
Tomoko Hojo + Rahel Kraft—Melted Into Darkness
Loke Rohbek—A Mess of Love
Samples from Library of Congress (Film communique no. 4)
Ian Wellman—Nitrogen
Geneva Skeen—Mirror Glimpse
U.S. Girls—Prove it All Night (Bruce Springsteen cover)
The Moon Lay Hidden Beneath A Cloud—Untitled 06
Faith Coloccia—Voice II Imprint
Sample from LIbrary of Congress, Tony Schwarz Collection
Pinkcourtesyphone—another interior
Maryanne Amacher—Stain – The Music Rooms (Live)
Oranssi Pazuzu—Ilmestys
Tati au Miel—Marinette Bwa Sech
Kepla & Deforrest Brown, Jr.—the black body is a technology that ensures white comfort and amusement
Daniel Menche—Smoke
clippng.—Enlacing
Marshall Trammell and William Fowler Collins—Untitleable
Shida Shahabi—Interlude + Main Theme (Lake on Fire)
Current 93—A Sadness Song
Carola Baer—Nothing Left to Say
Geneva Skeen—Union Strike in Beverly Hills 2014
Jeff Buckley—If You See Her, Say Hello
Double Bind is released on Room40 on the 13th of November 2020. You can find it here.
