Something I’ve been thinking about lately is how my approach to performance has evolved. I’m a self-taught musician. Although I was in the school orchestra for a few years and have taken classes here and there as an adult to brush up on specific skills, I didn’t have a formal or professional training in music.
“Vision and vibe” are obviously foundational, but I struggled to think in those terms sometimes when I was writing music in the past. I found the writing process itself to be so challenging that I often couldn’t really spread my creative wings and consider the overall concept, or feel a sense of competence when it came to fine-tuning certain elements.
How did Reliquary V come to be? Although I can’t recall exactly when I started using it for my instagram handle, I started using this alias for music officially in 2020. Prior to that, I had been making music under the name Kayla Guthrie, which for years had consisted of experimental songs presented as intimate and vulnerable performances.
Last night I had an epiphany that was a surprisingly long time coming. I'd been going through the previously-mentioned process of tracking demos, and the way I was doing it was sending each instrument straight into the computer, to get a totally dry recording of each that I planned to later mix and layer with effects and so forth. And it sounded, if not awful, just wrong.
In December 2021, I released Dematerialize, an album of electronic poetry that I’d been working on for the past several years. The recording was made available in cassette and digital form by New York City tape label Soap Library.
