This tape has had a strange and uncertain path to becoming the official seasonal mixtape of Summer 2023. It was originally supposed to be for Maria Barrios, but then I thought I had written it too far ahead of summer and that I should give it to the person I was spending the most time vibing in transcendent noise squalls with when I created it, Rob Galo. I decided to make Maria a new mixtape, and I will: but not until fall. Because I gave the tape to Rob as part of the Mercury Retrograde Sanity Mixtape Series, it’s out of the usual style of the Seasonal Mixtape Series, which also communicates how disjointed and out of sorts this season was as I relocated to Cleveland and bought a house all on my own and struggled with a lot of exhausting tasks and doubts and second and third and fourth and fifth thoughts. (It also indicates how interwoven these two different projects have become, as the retrograde tapes have become the space in which the seasonal mixtapes are really located and worked out.) Almost everything I own was packed up when I started working on this in early April…a lot of my life is still packed up now! Even the stuff I have unpacked is largely unorganized….all the supplies I use to work on these tapes are thrown into a tote bag or two in the basement until I have more breathing room; I don’t have the time or the energy to write a whole other mixtape this late in the season, after I already made fifteen draft tapes to come up with what you hear here! Since I already gave the master tape away, I’ve just rebuilt the tape as an mp3, so others can experience it.
(There is an error here: it should read LORIS S. SARID. )
Here’s the thing: I love this mixtape, and I can’t stop listening to it. The more I listen back to it, the more it totally makes sense as the tape to represent this season of my life. Even if I wrote it in April and May, it’s absolutely guiding my world through these summer months. Part of why I decided to make another tape for the Seasonal Mixtape Series was that I didn’t want to talk about this one publicly, but I’m a firm believer that the things we resist doing are often the things we most need to do.
When I envisioned this mixtape, I was thinking about a near future in which I would own my own home in Cleveland and what it would feel like…not just to have a space which is mine, but to be returned to my homeland, which is also a return to the setting of my extremely traumatic childhood. A lot of my early life is pushed into the deepest recesses of my mind, but around the time I was embarking on moving back to Cleveland and buying a house, this twisted memory kept coming back to me of these songs my abuser would come to my room and sing about how it was time to wake up, the sun is out, etc. It would come back to me every morning when I woke up. And now living in a house here paid for with his settlement money, I live with my trauma close to the surface all of the time. I think about never having privacy or safety growing up, I remember those songs making me feel endangered from the moment I woke up…now, here, in this house, where I do have privacy and safety, and in the place I stayed while I looked for a house where I wrote this tape. I think about how it’s no wonder I never wanted to wake up for so many years. The memory resurfaced and hasn’t gone away. I have to tend to it. This mixtape is a way of integrating it into my life in a way that feels empowering to me.
(And I think it’s good that I’m living with my trauma close to the surface, even though it’s hard. There’s really deep healing happening. And nothing was harder than trying to live while repressing all of this all of the time. I had to spend years of my life living in poverty to have the time and space to actually process my trauma. And poverty is constantly re-traumatizing.)
I don’t really want to say anything else about this? This is the first music of my new home every fucking day, from the moment I rise until I return to sleep. There’s stormy moments, dark corners, but ultimately things are lifting and the sun is getting stronger through the gaps in the clouds…there’s a sense of shifting in between light and dark and different channels or frequencies, and a pervasive sense of uncertainty–largely due to the total uncertainty of my life while I was creating it. Side D is a swirling out of possibility and anxiety working towards harmony and relief; I wrote that side as I made the winning offer on my house, after many unsuccessful offers. That’s how I knew it was the right ending for the tape.
I feel like everything that I could possibly say is already communicated better where the quiet, soft, pretty la-la-las erupt into the very, very noisy la-la-las at the epicenter of “Red Sea” by Asobi Seksu. That’s how I feel about this moment in my life. I haven’t had a lot of time for visitors, so I hope you enjoy this auditory journey through my house this season.
© COME AWAY WITH EMD 2023
COME AWAY WITH EMD 