13 years ago, a much younger version of myself played a show at a friend’s apartment in what was formerly East Berlin. I don’t remember a lot of details. There was a small PA on the balcony, which I plugged my ipod and microphone into. I stood on some piece of furniture to raise myself a bit higher above the small crowd of friends who had gathered for the performance.
It had only been a couple of years since I moved from Vancouver to New York, and this was my first time in Europe. Everyone in my friend group seemed to be coming and going between Canada, the US, and the EU, and none of us were thinking about the long term. Some of my friends who moved to Berlin back then ended up staying for over a decade, but at the time, everything was provisional, immediate.
During this era in my early twenties, I was compulsively self-effacing, and this bled into my approach to creativity. I was obsessed with playing non-venues, small gatherings, and private locations. Having finished art school a few years earlier, I found freedom in acting like a non-professional artist, in not pursuing the career objectives I saw my peers striving for, but rather, quietly finding my own lane doing what was interesting to me. This meant creating weird music and writing that filled the crevices between the professionalized culture industry and the fleeting, improvised creative communities that moved in its shadow.
I now can see that my hesitation to take the path that I was “supposed” to (ie. legibly productive, professional artist) was not so much failure or self-sabotage on my part, but just my way of circumventing expectations that had been imposed on me, while not making too much noise. Being young, I was still unknowingly burdened with familial baggage and the relationship types that arise from unresolved trauma, and my drive to keep up appearances was strong. The art I made had to exist within the constraints of my life at the time and not contradict its presuppositions. Performing was like a tiny shaft of light from a door left open just a sliver.
The thing that was difficult to grasp back then, and which I still have to remind myself from time to time, is that the landscape is constantly shifting. I found refuge for years in a style of performance that was essentially a coping mechanism. Slowly, my refusal to change pushed me further away from what was new and “relevant” and into the reaches of obscurity. I finally felt like I didn’t need to keep up with it all. I began to feel at home in the reclusive postures of the cult figures I had always looked up to in the first place.
At some point in this story, a recording from that night in Berlin resurfaced and made its way to cassette. The label, run by an ex, quickly folded after a short run of releasing poetry and artist editions; the cassette was their only musical release. Every few years, I receive an email from some intrepid person who has acquired the cassette but is unable to unlock its long-expired MP3 download codes.
I do still have the MP3s, and I gladly pass those along to those who ask nicely. I wanted to put them up for my Bandcamp subscribers, but I found that they don’t allow lossy file formats, with a stern warning against converting MP3s to WAVs. So, you’ll still have to email me if you want them. It’s probably better that way–a bygone moment and past self moving further out of reach as they recede in time.