Voluminous Arts

Black Meteoric Star - Disco 3xLP
Black Meteoric Star - Disco 3xLP
Black Meteoric Star - Disco 3xLP
Black Meteoric Star - Disco 3xLP
Black Meteoric Star - Disco 3xLP

Black Meteoric Star - Disco 3xLP

$40.00

DFA is thrilled to now offer releases from Voluminous Arts, the new label from Gavilán Rayna Russom, in our online store. Rayna has released a ton of music on DFA under aliases like Gavin Russom, Delia and Gavin, Black Meteoric Star and The Crystal Ark, and she's also been a member of LCD Soundsystem. She's since released music on a bunch of other labels (all of it very good!) and started Voluminous Arts in 2017.
Disco, the four Black Meteoric Star full-length, has been burning a hole in our turntable since we bought it.

Learn more about Voluminous Arts here.

Official blurb below...

Triple, multi-colored LP (LP1 is orange, LP2 is mint and LP3 is plum) with xeroxed cover. Digital download codes to be provided after purchase.

**

Voluminous Arts happily announces its third official release, a 12 track digital album and accompanying 3xLP limited 3 color vinyl edition entitled Disco by Gavilán Rayna Russom’s elusive alias Black Meteoric Star. This is not a Disco record. The title deliberately troubles the music biz’s incessant tendency to hierarchize genre classification over the experience of listening. If you must categorize these mutant sounds think of them as a proposed alternate score for those long, caffeinated sessions in Abby Sciuto’s forensics lab, the soundtrack to a heavy workout in the Westchester Danger Room or perhaps the musical accompaniment to deep body investigations of your own ancestral memories.

What this record really is, and why it’s called Disco has to do with the layering of time and life energy present in the spaces where we have traditionally danced to music which are sometimes called Discos. From the pounding urgency of “Muscle Machine” through the unbridled night vision romp that is “Fluid Feline Forms” and the shimmering investigations of “Whispers Between Worlds” to the extended lazer pointer focus of “I’m Unmelting” this record lays out a broad slab of practice-based research into the ghosts we connect with on the dance floor. Whether it be through partying in former industrial buildings, contested spaces of labor built on lands violently appropriated from indigenous people, uncomfortably inhabiting vacuums in queerness left by the AIDS epidemic, lifting lineages through sampling, or the relentless cycle of whitening that accompanies dance music’s march into the market, our experiences in the Disco have been permeated by the spectral and the haunted. Through rhythm and frequency, organized over time, this music blurs the veil between the living and the dead inviting those who move to it to connect with experiences beyond that false binary.

What you have here is another fantastic Black Meteoric Star record, as always made without multitracking or overdubbing, recorded directly from single live takes. It is is utterly consistent with all that name has come to mean, but on Disco Black Meteoric Star’s vision has been allowed to expand into an almost mythologically epic space. Ancestral time works differently. Settle in and absorb the frequencies. As the closing track suggests, the virtual Disco these sounds evoke is for “Freaks Only”.

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Black Meteoric Star - 3 Love Songs EP
Black Meteoric Star - 3 Love Songs EP
Black Meteoric Star - 3 Love Songs EP
Black Meteoric Star - 3 Love Songs EP
Black Meteoric Star - 3 Love Songs EP

Black Meteoric Star - 3 Love Songs EP

$13.00

DFA is thrilled to now offer releases from Voluminous Arts, the new label from Gavilán Rayna Russom, in our online store. Rayna has released a ton of music on DFA under aliases like Gavin Russom, Delia and Gavin, Black Meteoric Star and The Crystal Ark, and she's also been a member of LCD Soundsystem. She's since released music on a bunch of other labels (all of it very good!) and started Voluminous Arts in 2017.

Learn more about Voluminous Arts here.

Official blurb on this one from Rayna herself below...

Pink vinyl with a xeroxed cover. Digital download codes to be provided after purchase.

**

"The 3 Love Songs EP comes out of a live show I did at a house party. I grew up and came of age playing shows in people's houses but hadn't done it in a while. My good friends L'Amour Bleu, a New York based band I'm a big fan of asked me to play with them at their record release party. It would have been impossible to bring my normal equipment and perform my normal Black Meteoric Star set so I decided to create something stripped down and simple that would require a minimal amount of gear. Black Meteoric Star live shows often include vocal elements that don't appear on the record, but some of those elements began to creep into more recent recordings such as "No Map" on The Xecond Xoming of Black Meteoric Star and the two poems I read on the No More White Presidents Soundtrack. This stripped down and more "punk" incarnation gave me an opportunity to formalize and expand on these vocal elements. I was just beginning to truly awaken to and accept my trans feminine identity and grasped onto the idea of a love song that, defying convention, spoke about my relationship with my inner world and the elemental forces around me rather than a cherished "other", imagined or real. After performing at the event I felt the "songs' were strong enough to record and the result was this EP. As with all Black Meteoric Star music these are live takes to cassette tape with no multitracking or editing." 

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Rat Porridge - Live from the Plant Cassette
Rat Porridge - Live from the Plant Cassette
Rat Porridge - Live from the Plant Cassette
Rat Porridge - Live from the Plant Cassette

Rat Porridge - Live from the Plant Cassette

$10.00

DFA is thrilled to now offer releases from Voluminous Arts, the new label from Gavilán Rayna Russom, in our online store. Rayna has released a ton of music on DFA under aliases like Gavin Russom, Delia and Gavin, Black Meteoric Star and The Crystal Ark, and she's also been a member of LCD Soundsystem. She's since released music on a bunch of other labels (all of it very good!) and started Voluminous Arts in 2017.

Learn more about Voluminous Arts here.

Official blurb below...

Digital download codes to be provided after purchase.

**

Jamaica Queens born artist Rat Porridge’s work is layered, complex and presents multiple entry points from which one can absorb its potent combination of intensities. One of these is the translucent green of the cassette tape and cover artwork that hold her inaugural release on Voluminous Arts in physical form. Another is the title of this debut album, Live from the Plant. Together these two creative choices already present an interwoven set of meanings and associations that allow entry to the depths that lie within her surging condensations of sonic information. The color green evokes both effusive botanical growth and the toxic sludge produced by manufacturing, while the words “Live” and “Plant” evoke similar associations through language. In her own words, “it’s very multi-meaning, the ‘plant’ is the organic plant of earth, and then there’s the ‘plant’ of the industrial plant. The plant could be a lot of different things, and it’s all those things.”

On Live from the Plant, Rat Porridge uses the permeable and malleable properties of sound to engage the relationships between these multiple meanings in ways that orient themselves towards healing and towards ancestral time, rather than colonial models of binary opposition and categorization. Space and its relationship to the body is a core concept connecting multiple threads of meanings in Rat’s work. Her songs are permeated by field recordings, gathered from spaces, such as shuttered shopping areas, within her environment that have been left empty of commerce and full of possibility after outliving their use to extractive commodity-based market interests. They also reverberate with the physical spaces in which they were recorded; bedroom and basement, critical and traditional sites of underground artistic exploration and community building. Her voice resonates from within the space of her physical body and echoes back from the rooms she works in, creating one of many cumulative forms of repetition present in the work. Repetition also plays a role in her lyrics, which repeat enough times to give listeners added meaning with each engagement. This awareness of space, and of one’s place and power within it grows from her engagement with performance art, activism and the communities she is a part of. As one listens to the album, it becomes a transcription of these interrelated activities, one that charts a trajectory of both individual and collective healing as she ecstatically expands on the rhythmic cycling present in both dance floor oriented music and what mental health practitioners refer to as “circular thinking”. 

With repetition and a circular continuity at their pulsing core, Rat Porridge’s works on Live from the Plant unleash a regimentation-shattering energy that is saturated with multiple temporalities, locations and emotions. Rat’s music, with all of its texture and performance, subverts expectations of what healing art should be: “I feel like there’s an association with so-called ‘healing’ music that it should only be soft, ambient or like easy listening or something like that… relaxing… I listen to things like that, and it's not like I’m not using some of those sounds… but there’s something with just like addressing the brokenness, or addressing the really difficult parts as well, that is like, a step towards the deeper healing.... I’m opening up and so is the art.”

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Gavilán Rayna Russom - Trans-Verberation Cassette
Gavilán Rayna Russom - Trans-Verberation Cassette
Gavilán Rayna Russom - Trans-Verberation Cassette
Gavilán Rayna Russom - Trans-Verberation Cassette

Gavilán Rayna Russom - Trans-Verberation Cassette

$10.00

DFA is thrilled to now offer releases from Voluminous Arts, the new label from Gavilán Rayna Russom, in our online store. Rayna has released a ton of music on DFA under aliases like Gavin Russom, Delia and Gavin, Black Meteoric Star and The Crystal Ark, and she's also been a member of LCD Soundsystem. She's since released music on a bunch of other labels (all of it very good!) and started Voluminous Arts in 2017.

Learn more about Voluminous Arts here.

Official blurb below...

Digital download codes to be provided after purchase.

**

Long ago, in the days before Rayna quit drinking, one of her favorite cocktails was something of her own invention called a “Saint Teresa”; iced chamomile tea and gin, usually Crystal Palace brand. To call it a cocktail is ridiculous, considering her technique was to mix it in an old orange juice bottle and carry that around all night. Something about the botanicals used in distilling the gin and mixing the chamomile leaves and flowers produced a mildly psychedelic effect before the inevitable blackout. The drink’s name came from the fascination-bordering-on-obsession Rayna developed for the story and writings of Saint Teresa of Ávila. She sought these out after being shown Bernini’s sculptural rendering of St Teresa’s experience of being penetrated by the Holy Spirit in an art history class in the early 90’s. She often spent most of that class sitting next to her girlfriend so they could fondle each other in the darkened lecture hall; the mix of religious ecstasy, sexuality and attention to detail in the sculpture lodged deeply in her consciousness. As a deeply spiritual and often extremely solitary and private person, her love of the story that animated Bernini’s hand has continued to grow throughout her life, especially after multiple visits in the late 90’s and early 2000’s to the chapel of Santa Maria de la Vittoria in Rome where the sculpture is currently kept. Transverberation sees her returning to that story as a sober woman in her mid 40’s, initiated into several spiritual traditions that specifically work with the energy of saints. The 9 works that comprise this release are also informed by her experiences of quarantine and social distancing. In an environment of enforced solitude and ramping collective horniness, the idea and practice of sexual intimacy with god became deep, complex and necessary.

As a sober person with much experience of the psychedelic, Rayna’s connection with and development of spirituality as an expansive, living energy has been vital. The idea that intimacy with god could have a sexual dimension, or could even be contextualized by sexuality has been an important component of this connection and development, one that sets the experiences of the divine she sonically describes on Transverberation very far from the staunch conservatism of Chistinaity in its colonial forms. Rayna’s spirituality affirms the body and all of its desires and fantasies, and it was for this reason that St Teresa’s writing, and the fantastical and erotic webs it weaves spoke to her and continues to be a reference point. When she no longer had the ecstatic effects of drugs and alcohol to draw on for a sense of connectedness, she found that her body’s demands for connection through channels of sexuality increased, and that a simplistic understanding of sexuality was no longer sustainable. In the isolation of quarantine, this imperative to shift sexuality from the rigid and compartmentalized definitions that its commodification in our shame based culture has created to an expansive method of connection with the creative energies of the universe increased.

It became a method of survival and sustainability. While this connection sometimes took the form of engagement with other individuals and their bodies or with the images and descriptions of them as transmitted via text messages, voice notes, pictures or webcam feeds, its anchor was in the connection to a sustainability affirming divine source. Engagement with another individual, although welcomed, was not necessary to experience connection with this source. It was simply one manifestation of it. At the center, anchoring her during this time, which continues to unfold, was the knowing that her creator could be as near to her as she was willing to have that energy be, and that included both its admission into her body and the opening of that energy force to her body’s deepest sexual desires.

Transverberation describes an embodied and self-determined spirituality, one that embraces and entwines with rich and creative sexualities rather than compartmentalizing them. This avenue of spiritual experience connects with the lives of the Saints, especially St. Teresa, not through the gateway guarded by the church but directly through the vinculum of the ecstatic. Its sonically immersive descriptions map a spirituality that reclaims ritual and resides within the sexual as a communion with divine creative forces and their residues that manifest in nature, resistance and the spirit world. As both a digital album with tracks separated and discreet, or as a cassette tape where they blend together into a contiguous landscape on each side, the album unfolds itself like a rosary, reminiscent of St Teresa’s concept of the interior castle in which deepening experiences of prayer lead one through a complex of mansions where increasingly profound modes of connection become possible. Sounds, more spun than woven, evoke echoing hallways, intimate breaths, silent faces and disembodied voices. In ringing tones one hears and feels not only the reverberant bell but the wand that strikes it and the grip of the hand that holds the wand. There are moments of wailing, mourning, screaming, bleeding, cumming, dying and birthing. This passionate energy, although it celebrates the fluidity of sexuality, does not pursue transgression as much as it proposes that the strictures that religion, in collusion with capital and the state, put on sexuality are themselves transgressions against the body. Through sound, composed in time, Transverberation constructs another type of interior architecture, one in which the supervision and punitive prudishness of colonialism are absent, and an unconditionally loving, gorgeous, horny and perverse divine power is palpably present.

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Black Meteoric Star - No More White Presidents Soundtrack Cassette
Black Meteoric Star - No More White Presidents Soundtrack Cassette
Black Meteoric Star - No More White Presidents Soundtrack Cassette
Black Meteoric Star - No More White Presidents Soundtrack Cassette

Black Meteoric Star - No More White Presidents Soundtrack Cassette

$10.00

DFA is thrilled to now offer releases from Voluminous Arts, the new label from Gavilán Rayna Russom, in our online store. Rayna has released a ton of music on DFA under aliases like Gavin Russom, Delia and Gavin, Black Meteoric Star and The Crystal Ark, and she's also been a member of LCD Soundsystem. She's since released music on a bunch of other labels (all of it very good!) and started Voluminous Arts in 2017.

Learn more about Voluminous Arts here.

Official blurb below...

Digital download codes to be provided after purchase.

**

Black Meteoric Star's original soundtrack for the film "No More White Presidents" unofficial cat# VOL001, the first release on Voluminous Arts. Sprawling across each 30-minute side of this cassette are tape saturated and distorted sounds from the depths of BMS’s well. Distinctions between “track” and “interlude” are blurred. Poetry emerges from surging lagoons of synthesizer sound and beats push forth from noise. 

No More White Presidents is a multi-layered abstract film by Gavilán Rayna Russom. She began the film in 2015 and after working on it gradually over two years completed it in January of 2017. It is the first formal occurrence of the “flash film” technique that now forms the central structural device of her filmmaking practice. This technique has connections to both compositional techniques such as serialism and chance operations and craft technologies such as beading, braiding and weaving. The film engages the failures of capitalism via an extended meditation on the different forms of unreconciled dead its fallout has accumulated. 

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