Hey friends! Happy new year! It all happened so fast, I didn't even have any time to promo it here. What a wild ride! I played my first live synth show on NYE, hosted by Earth Modular Society. It was so badass, I broadcasted from my basement and played a stream train where musicians from all over the world showcased their talents and impressive rigs for almost 20 hours straight. It was a marathon of bleeps n bloops and I feel honored to have been a part of it.

​I also survived my audio interface going down minutes before my set started, causing me to reroute my entire set up through my mixing board instead. From the beginning this has always been my biggest fear (losing my audio signal either from an instrument or all together during a live performance) and now I can say I lived through it without losing my shit too bad - which is a real triumph. I know how to get through technical difficulties during a puppet show just fine, but it's a different pandora's box when we're talking complete dead air.

In the summer of 2020, I was one of the many who were grappling with mortality, which started to rattle the cage on - if this is it, I wanna go down swingin - I want to do things I said I would do when I "had the time," which as we all know never comes.

Turns out, on the top of that list was learning how to play an instrument. I taught myself how to play a little piano by ear when I was around 8 years old, but got stumped when I got to the part of the workbook that introduced the black keys. I am 35 now, and happy to report I am still at odds with the black keys (no, not those The Black Keys - they are great). I started out by buying an analog synthesizer, that lead me to a vocoder/mini drum machine, which required a keyboard controller to utilize the full range it's capabilities. While I was shopping around for one, I came across Elektron and their catalog of incredible beauties, so I picked up a few of their gems. I'll probably write a blog post soon with a gear run down and talk about my experience onboarding myself to the electronic music making process, from exploring the instruments themselves to teching out the integration workflow between all the moving pieces.

I want to demystify the music making process and make it more approachable to BIPOC women and non-binary people, I want there to be more queers behind the decks, I want more ADA-accessible venues to allow disabled music makers the chance to shine, I want peer-to-peer support across gender lines, that requires yt men to share their resources and knowledge with marginalized people who are excited and ready to learn.

I have 0 aptitude in music making, outside creating etherial soundscape and film scoring, however 90% my friends throughout my life have been in bands, all of partners with 2 exceptions have been in bands - yet I'm always the one taking photos. For all the band practices I've had to sit in on, for all the gear I've hauled during load outs - no one has ever offered to teach me a chord or how to keep a beat on the drums. Logistically, I find that ridiculous.

It wasn't until Gloria Stienem inspired me to make music as an act of feminist rebellion that I really started to put in the hours practicing. I'm learning everything from scratch and it's THRILLING. I love how instantaneous the process is, no prototyping involved! Right now I'm in a bubble of pure experimentation and I forgot how good it feels to fall in love with a new art form, to submerge myself in a new fascination. I'm so excited to see where this goes, I've vowed not to ruin this time of enraptured exploration by suffocating it with expectations. This is only for fun and will remain fun as long as I don't try to push it to grow faster than it's own natural pace.