Just Stupendous (2017)

Just Stupendous was written and recorded in a dizzying, furious fit of activity, producing the whole album in about 6 weeks using Reason, a Shure SM57, and an assortment of guitars. Influences of Beck, Radiohead, and Frank Zappa can be heard. As a kind of diary, the album is rough-hewn; independently produced, its sounding affect does not comport to expectations of typical commercial recording.

Defying easy categorization, the album was imagined and executed as a reflection on impermanence, gender performance, and the artist’s wrestling with an emergent transgender identity. Throughout the album’s 17 tracks, a polyfurcation (a generative splitting into many parts) of identity, musical, personal, interpersonal, can be heard through processes of deconstruction (The Nihilists’ Ball), sampling (Prelude, Torrey), and decomposition (Interlude, Panel1, Meditation). Opening the album, Prelude sets the conceptual stage by focusing on the hyper-masculinity, homoeroticism, self-aggrandizement, and performance of professional wrestling, a defiant romanticism that reflects, with irony, the artist realizing and accepting her own transgender identity; this album is a compliment, a last stand, a rebuttal, a swirling, tempestuous microcosm of contradictory signs and signifiers attempting to rectify inner turmoil and alienation with the artist’s newfound insight and acceptance. Released on SoundCloud and distributed among family and friends, the album stands as a work of personal process, trauma, frustrations, and the pursuit of deep, inner acceptance.

San Marcos, California, 2017.