geneva skeen: double bind

Los Angeles based artist Geneva Skeen returns to Room40 with her second full-length edition. Born out of the ashes of 2020's cascade of heartbreak and uncertainty, Skeen unpacks the chaotic and unruly events with agency, heaping the distorted eruptions of her day to day into a soldering pyre of voice, pulsing rhythm, textured electronics, and masked field recordings. This is a reflexive music, made for unlocking the possibilities of the moment rather than being caged in by their particulars. Poet Aristilde Kirby writes: "Flower branches dowsing rod against their doubles in the wind's aimless static. Spindled fog verglas plants, caressed by white rays of absolute eyelash. [A wisp of fresh respiration] 'The world has no visible order & all I have is the order of my breath,' says the fifth track on Double Bind. [A ribbon of a scream] It has the incandescent & incantation-like quality of the title of Fushitshusha's 2014 album: Nothing Changes No One Can Change Anything I Am Ever Changing You Can Only Change Yourself. [Asemic voices from anywhere] What can you count on these days in 2020, outside of the pacing of your breath as we all struggle to cleave to each passing beat pair & repair? [Spirals of a finger on glass] Between two right hands, neither really righter than the other, we have no choice but to hold on to the you one holds dearest to: the beads of just being. [Sinewaves in phase] When I comb my hair to get ready for the day, I realize that the black static it collects was always meant to fall away. [Synthetic graupel in flames] Here, Skeen specializes in ambient music as the pellucid space of an emotional landscape, limned in Timothy Morton's ethos of dark ecology & Gloria Anzaldua's idea of nepantla. It is equally phenomenological, psychological, spiritual & visceral. If you ask me, Geneva is a poet who works in sound sculpture. She cures slabs of lived time as if flesh marble & makes of her subconscious an underworld for the listener to locate themselves in. [Bats that clamor as strata of bleeding leather] The through-lines of her past works are clear as a fault crack & in this instance, glimmer like quartz veins. [Tiny harmonic partials prick like an ice pick] Skeen knows that to protect the lit wick, you have to cup the darkness. [Anvil & shelves of overcast guitar drop into a weak bell pulse] She knows that to get past a hard period, like timing a total eclipse's black sun, you have to account for every degree, every granular shift, of lost movement..."