Winter 2024//as above, so below

I am very pleased to share the first seasonal mixtape of 2024. This tape is for my best friend, Oz, and I hope it keeps me with them through this winter, since I cannot visit them in LA, as I had planned to. Oz was the first person to point out to me that mixtapes are my magical practice; they say they’re going to keep this one on their solstice death altar.

This tape is heavily about winter, which always also makes it about death, the struggle inherent to existence–but things like the ongoing genocide in Gaza also make it very literally about death, trauma both present and ancestral, “a web of thought, of tangled vision: humanity” as the Tom Tom Club say…the sense that some of us survive at the expense of countless others, the sense that we have to do what we have to do to survive to be of any use at all, but if we don’t stop pursuing survival within a system that is killing us all, we won’t survive, anyway. It’s extremely dark, but somehow bright at the same time. It holds the necessary tensions to an existence marked by constantly multiplying crises. It’s a psychedelic slapper! A long walk into the dark, danced through the cold night into a swirling snow globe of luminous potentialities.

Oz and I met as neighbors in Chicago when we were both grappling with our Saturn Returns as adult survivors of similar childhood traumas–Oz moved into the apartment above mine just as my life was transitioning away from being a teacher and the Chicago club scene to an awareness that I was living with complex PTSD and needed to more seriously understand how it impacts me and reorganize my life in a way that takes it into account. It’s also when I got a lot more seriously into astrology and other forms of magic and divination. Oz’s place was full of tarot decks, altars, candles, and smoke.

Over the course of my mixtape projects, divination has become central to the act of generating them and astrological phenomena have become linked through Mercury retrogrades becoming the time in which I am always composing the next seasonal tape. The two projects have finally become unified with this tape, which has the poster of the Mercury retrograde tape series I used to work on composing it as the cover for the seasonal mixtape that resulted from these studies I made and sent to other people along the way. The idea for this mixtape theme actually came from a book of watercolors containing a combination tarot and astrology reading, created by Christina Carter, who is both one of my favorite humans and favorite artists. In my bedroom, I am currently surrounded and protected by beautiful objects she sent me on all sides.

I return to a lot of the same albums that were included on spring 2022//the sputtering chariot of the vernal equinox–a tape which was a really major turning point in the activation of the magic in my mixtape-making process and its utility as a tool for self-actualization. These are albums which recur because I love them very much and will probably keep playing them forever, but they’re also Bush war era albums, which have been resonating heavily for me because of the atrocities going down in Gaza for over two months.

This mixtape has a complex and bifurcated feeling–in moments it’s about me coming into my own power and having more security than ever before–but with this backdrop of war, genocide, homelessness, crisis upon crisis building up without resolution. In truth, nothing ever is truly secure, and what we have perceived as security is daily exposed as a lie, reduced to a rubble of what basic protections any of us can anticipate to have in this world, a graveyard for any and all hopes, dreams, and reasonable expectations. Across time, space, and genre, the veil thins and we root ourselves in something older than the capitalist death machine. We communicate with the ancestors. It shifts between the personal and collective, between the above and below, between “hell” and “hope.” Between wanting to be in community and not feeling ready for the winter weather and being happy alone doing my own thing under the great city of Cleveland, buried in snow.

At the outset of beginning to create this one, I was still listening to my fall mixtape a lot and honestly had no idea what this tape was going to be about. I haven’t been delving deep into new music: life has honestly been totally overwhelming for the past year. When it started to take shape, however, it came together very quickly. The first half was composed within three drafts–I just changed the order up on side B to follow a “no desire” to having desire again pattern–and the sixth draft actually became the official sides C/D and I had to make another version for the person I intended to make the tape for before it ended up being “the one.”

Oz is an incredible artist and activist and also lives with late stage Lyme disease, which has been wreaking havoc on every system of their body for a very long time. I once pulled them out of the death void in an emergency room in a super fucked out ER on Chicago’s deep west side, but they’ve been experiencing fairly regular visits from the void since then. I feel like we are connected on a cosmic level. Our friendship has taught me so much about love and communication and the nature of trauma and healing, oppression and liberation. We are both seriously coming into our own power at the same time and this mixtape connects those experiences along with the tensions shared between our similar and connected struggles in existence. The act of creation is alchemical and no one has made that more clear to me than Oz. Hopefully, my own conjuring abilities on this tape make evident the value and impact their presence has had on my own being in the world.

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© COME AWAY WITH EMD 2023-24