photo by Kevin Yatarola.
On Wednesday, Kiki and Herb: Seeking Asylum! will wrap up its triumphant return at Joe’s Pub here in New York City. These intensely beloved characters, the cabaret noms de plume of Mx. Justin Vivian Bond and Kenny Mellman, have played all over the world at various points in the past two decades, but for longtime fans like myself, the show is forever tied to a mostly bygone era of downtown New York.
Photo by Zia Anger
For nearly a decade now, Julianna Barwick has made a career out of articulating the ineffable. The New York artist’s songs are built out of competing clouds of voice—her own—looped, processed, reverbed, and filtered through what sounds like some kind of divine light. Over the course of three progressively more sanguine full-length albums, Barwick has built upon her strengths, slowly adding layers of production finesse as well as deftly-employed instrumentation—synths, cello, drums—to augment her ephemeral sound.
Her newest album, Will, is also her most curiously dynamic. Recorded in fits and starts between upstate New York, the Moog Factory in Asheville, North Carolina, and Lisbon, Portugal, the record also includes contributions from Mas Ysa’s Thomas Arsenault, Dutch cellist Maarten Vos, and percussionist Jamie Ingalls. Will all but eschews conventional song structure in favor of compositions that move and mutate like cyclical, natural forms—collages of sound that build and retreat with the sonic quality of fog—a delicate mass composed entirely of soft edges. While the record certainly bears some of the hallmarks of Barwicks earlier work, Will skews slightly darker in tone, adding textural elements like more pronounced synth sounds, additional human voices, and in the case of album closer “See, Know,” actual drums.
Given the nature of her music, Barwick has grown accustomed to weird expectations. “I think people assume I’m just like some weird lady who lives in a tree or something,” she jokes when we meet up for lunch in Brooklyn. In reality, Barwick has spent the better part of the last three years continuously on the move. Spending time with her, it’s clear that her music—much of her life, actually—is deeply rooted in natural curiosity that was informed by a childhood spent singing in church choirs and a lifelong affinity with the nature.
Though she takes her work very seriously, Barwick also has a funny sense of humor about it. “I’m not this gentle fairy creature person,” she tells me. “I like to be mischievous and I love funny stuff. I get that what I do is kind of weird and not everyone is gonna get it, but I’m really not some super boring New Age person…I hope.”
If you were lucky enough to move to New York City in the early 2000s — just around the time that bands like the Strokes and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs were giving downtown a justly deserved kick in the balls — you might have also been lucky enough to see Antony and the Johnsons performing somewhere like the Knitting Factory or the Kitchen. Even moreso than the rock bands of the era, seeing Antony Hegarty (now known simply as ANOHNI) performing in a dingy bar was actually the stuff fabled NYC dreams are made of. To see this mysterious, gender-indeterminate figure with the voice of an angel singing Angelo Badalamenti covers to a room full of queer degenerates such as myself was both inspiring and life-giving: It was the reason people like me came to this city, to rub elbows with the kind of people that simply could not exist anywhere else.
PHOTO COURTESY OF ANNE VALEUR.
For well over a decade, Susanna Wallumrød has written and recorded some of the most beautiful and inscrutable pop music in the world. Originally working under the moniker of Susanna and the Magical Orchestra, the Norwegian singer first drew international attention with albums that mixed original songs with a variety of unconventional covers. (Her versions of Dolly Parton’s “Jolene” and Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart” are essential.) During the last 10 years—and simply under the name Susanna—she has released five evocative solo albums, the latest of which, Triangle, was released on Friday. Described as “soul music for lost souls,” the album comprises songs that examine and dissect popular notions regarding religion and spirituality, stitched together by piano, violins, horns, and Susanna's otherworldly voice. It is, as the press materials describe it, a record “filled with magical omens, apocalyptic fires, black holes, and floodwaters that constantly threaten oblivion.”
from Issue 189 of Jalouse
It’s been a rollercoaster year for Hari Nef. In May of 2015 the 23 year-old actress and model signed a contract with IMG Models (the very same month she graduated from the theater program at NYC’s Columbia University) , making her the first transgender model signed to their roster. She has set runways alight for the likes of Adam Selman, VFiles, and Gucci while her writing on sex, gender, and identity graced the pages of Dazed, Vice, Blackbook and Adult. Just as her star in the fashion world and her reputation as the new doyenne of downtown NYC continued to rise she was cast in the second season of Transparent, tackling the role of a tragically doomed German cross-dresser with incredible aplomb that it appeared as if the role had been written especially for her (and it was). Though she is happy to serve as both an inspiration and muse for trans people everywhere, she is quick to point out that there is much more to her appeal than just her gender and her almost preternatural sense of style. “I have a lot more to offer to you than an identity and a body,” she says. “I have perspective and I have talent-- those exist on their own.”
T Cole Rachel: Were you a super performative kid? Did you always want to be an actress?
Hari Nef: Oh yes. I'm still a super performative kid. I always wanted people to understand me and feel what I was feeling and see what I was seeing. I guess performativity was just something that I sort of harnessed to translate myself to all of these people I had in my life.
Rachel: You’ve been very open about your experiences as a trans woman and I’m sure there is a certain amount of pressure on you to be a representative of the trans community. For trans people in the public eye, there is always this intense fixation on gender and presentation. Is it your hope that eventually people will start to fixate less on that part of your life?
Hari Nef: I hope it will. I'm just happy to be here, happy to be working. If people are still asking me the same things that they're asking me now in five years, I'm going to start to get a little worried, because I'm going to be bored. And I hope that this becomes boring for people. I hope that after a certain amount of education and discourse is sort of disseminated throughout the world that we can move forward, because everybody is asking me these questions under this supposition that we need to educate people, and I believe that's true. We need to deconstruct stigmas about bodies and identities. I don't feel like it's going to happen overnight, but at the risk of sounding arrogant, I'll say I have a lot more to offer to you than an identity and a body. I have perspective and I have talent, and those things--while perhaps inextricably informed and enmeshed in my lived experiences as a trans woman and many other myriad identities I carry-- those exist on their own. I'm a trans model, I'm a trans actress. I'm also a model and I'm also an actress.
Rachel: As trans people continue to become more visible in popular culture, there’s a hope that one day it won’t be seen as such an anomaly.
Hari Nef: I feel like as the word transgender is starting to be defined for people by popular culture, but If you're only looking at five people to represent an entire community, you need to understand that there are armies of people on the trans spectrum that do not resemble these folks that are your reference points, that do not have the same lived experiences as your reference points, who do not identify along the same gender binary as your reference points. Being trans is not about, "I was born one way but now I identify as another way." It's really about this idea of gender fluidity and being able to look at someone who is gender variant to any extent and affirm their identity. It's not just about binary trans women, or binary trans men, or people who have medically transitioned or had certain either feminizing or masculinizing procedures or whatever. It's less about the people you're seeing and more about the way you see people.
Rachel: Thinking about this past year, what have been the biggest surprises for you?
Hari Nef: Things that have happened to me or things that I've done, like signing a worldwide modeling contract with IMG, making my acting debut on Transparent, walking the Gucci show. I never expected that any of this would happen to me. Maybe there was a certain sense that I thought that maybe I could take my talent somewhere, but especially after coming to terms with my gender identity and a lot of the pain that was associated with that, all of my dreams came true right at the moment I was sort of becoming comfortable with giving up on my dreams. Understanding that my gender variance is probably going to make things very difficult for me, and understanding that there were so few precedents for people with my body and my identity doing the things that I wanted to do, that I should never ever bank on doing them…and then a bunch of them happened anyway. That was the biggest surprise, because I didn't expect it and neither did anybody else. Before I signed with IMG, every other agency--literally every other one--either wouldn't even meet with me or just straight up wouldn't sign me. This was not a sure thing, for anybody, much less me. Just the fact that I'm even sitting here is a surprise to me still.
Rachel: In terms of acting, do you have a dream project?
Hari Nef: I would love to play Lady Macbeth. I would love to play Stella in A Streetcar Named Desire. I would love to play Candy Darling in a biopic. Or Patti Smith! There are dream roles out there, but because I don't bank on getting those roles, my big dream is to write for myself and to create a role that I can embody. I feel and think this a lot of the time, but a lot of my fellow trans girls just say it straight up, "None of this shit is made for us. These clothes aren't made for us, these movies aren't made for us, this shit is not made for us, and people don't want us around." They look at me and say, "Okay, little Ivy League white girl, you got through the door, good for you. We love you, but your inhabiting this space doesn't necessarily mean that they want any more of us in there than there already are." So I try to have an open heart about my collaborations, but there is a part of me that has these voices going through me, that none of this shit is made for me. Sometimes you have to make something for yourself.
