After many months of anticipation, I played my first live show of the year a couple of weeks ago. Fittingly, it happened on Friday the 13th at Verboden Festival, a 5-day goth bacchanal here in “Vancouver,” which so happened to culminate in a Scorpio eclipse. I played to a crowd of merry festivalgoers after 1am, opening up the witching hour festivities that went late into the night.
In spite of being consistently masked up, I managed to finally catch Covid for the first time at some point during all this, so I spent the following week in isolation. It was certainly a dramatic turn of events to go from multiple crowded shows every night to complete solitude. Last night, a week later, I was able to have a delayed festival comedown of sorts when I live-streamed a pre-recorded set on Strict Tempo, a twitch channel and IRL dark electronic event series hosted by Seattle DJ Vox Sinistra.
I had recorded the set at a rehearsal space a few weeks earlier, and layered atmospheric video edits over my live performance. It was a small creative experiment, but creating my own visuals, as simple as they were, felt empowering. In many past endeavours, I didn’t have the confidence to embrace my own visions for the visual presentation of my work, so I often relied on the creativity of others.
I still love to collaborate, especially with talented photographers, but lately I’ve taken a much more personal approach to creativity. It began out of necessity, because I no longer have the disposable income to hire people to help with my projects (although I’m learning to apply for grants for certain things). It felt humbling at first, but since I’ve started tapping into my own creative resources, I’ve felt more inspired, confident, and connected to my work than ever before.
Tuning into my own inner resources has been helping me to deepen my felt sense of my art. I have a tendency to be over-analytical, a trait that I’ve been working to overcome in the studio in various ways. Sometimes I squeeze the thing dry by trying to pin it down too quickly.
It’s been humbling to realize how I get in my own way, but judgement is also counterproductive. So it’s been a nice energetic redirection to delve into a more holistic artistic approach, where visuals, music, and poetry align. Letting go of hard and fast rules for myself has also resulted in softening of the barriers between my different artistic practices.
This week, I announced an upcoming residency I’m doing at Lobe, a spatial sound studio in the area that’s one of only 2 locations worldwide equipped with 4DSOUND software and hardware. It’s new territory for me on a technical and creative level, and also in the sense that it’s the first time that I’ve used the name Reliquary V in a “professional art context” outside of the underground music scene. When I was asked to submit an artist bio for the occasion, I did a subtle rewrite, which attempted to link my past activities in the institutional (or institution-adjacent) art career track, and my more recent ones in the music world.
It was an attempt to write something that gestured at who I am currently and who I am becoming as an artist, as well as what I’ve done in the past. I do feel that the past is starting to recede more quickly. I’m almost sold out of my tape Dematerialize, which came out last year but is based on poems that were originally written between 2012 and 2015. I also just mailed out one of my last copies of my book Sunsets Working, a long poem published in 2015.
It really does feel like a chapter is coming to a close, and I can finally release that past. I haven’t removed all my past publications and releases from my bio as of yet, but I can see the day when I will be able to do that. It was hard to let go of my origin story that began with my arrival in New York. I felt bound to that story for quite a while, and was only really able to release it once I moved away. I didn’t want to let go of the currency it had, the promise of resources, as meager and dry as they had become for me.
In letting go of that story, I have started to tap into my own inner resources, a deeper creativity that I knew I had but didn’t feel confident enough to show fully. It has been an ego death of sorts, one that is still ongoing. My post-eclipse Covid isolation was like dwelling on a strange planet, one that I am still roaming. Many dark and haunting visions have been making themselves known through the art I’ve been creating during this time.
But there is something comforting to the darkness. It feels rich and deep. I’ve been meditating on the figure of Mercury, which is currently experiencing a planetary retrograde. It’s the ruling planet of my personal chart, and one of its many attributes is its ability to take on the qualities of the planet or sign where it finds itself at any given time.
Mercury, in the Roman pantheon, was a liminal deity who moved between heaven, earth, and the underworld, a messenger able to pass uncannily between worlds, conveying the words of kings and gods. Mercury is also known as a psychopomp who guided the souls of the dead through the underworld. A chimeric deity moving swiftly between the veils, receiving, analyzing, and delivering communications from the murky depths to the gilded courts.
There’s something about the impartial dedication in Mercury’s ceaseless travels, particularly through the land of the dead, that rings true for me on a creative level. Among other things, Mercury is a ruler of thresholds, crossroads, or boundaries. There is a fearlessness at the precipice, a figure who meets you as you stand before the unknown, someone equally conversant in the language of the living and the mysteries of the underworld. It’s a place I’ve been hanging out in quite a bit lately.