This is Their Music

As the last post of Women’s History Month, I wanted to spend a little bit of time shedding light on the trans women who are making really cool stuff right now. The music landscape does have quite a few trans women in it. In recent months, there was considerable discussion on the internet about the work of Ethel Cain. Jane Remover has built herself a sizable fan base with her blend of shoegaze and ;bedroom pop. While there is bad work out there—Ethel Cain’s Preacher’s Daughter immediately comes to mind—there is also a bunch of very good work. For example, there are women like Wendy Carlos, whose music you know if you’ve watched A Clockwork Orange, The Shining, or Tron, and SOPHIE, the standard bearer for the hyperpop movement. Their work has been extremely inspirational to many and very enjoyable.

For this dispatch, I wanted to spend some time talking about some trans women who are making interesting music. It will not be surprising to learn that many of them are in the electronic/dance space, an area that has historically been welcoming to queer people. Regardless of where they live musically, each artist’s music is absolutely worthy of your attention.

Before going to the electronic realm, I’m going to discuss a couple of women from the underground rock/experimental scene.

Romy Vager (RVG)

In recent years, Australia has come into its own as a site for exciting indie pop and rock. One of the leading figures in that country’s scene is Romy Vager. Leading her band, RVG, Vager writes songs that can be simultaneously funny and cutting, sometimes in the same line. The band’s sound pulls from college rock sounds of yore as well as modern post-punk, making them sound both familiar and new. RVG has released three albums, and each one is a clear improvement upon the previous one. Her band’s most recent album, Brain Worms, is a rollicking listen with Vager contributing her regularly incisive lyrics and her band providing the speed, jangle, and muscle.

claire rousay

Prolific experimental musician claire rousay has been releasing music since 2017. Her music, which she describes as “emo ambient,” tends to incorporate field recordings and snippets of talk into sparse musical landscapes occupied by pianos, various stringed instruments, and electronics. Her music recalls the work of Grouper as well as Kranky artists of the early 2000s such as Charalambides and Loren Mazzacane Connors. While it does not hit with a direct immediacy, rousay’s music is moving and engaging, easing you into its world. She recently released a new album on Thrill Jockey, no floor, with her long-time friend—and also trans woman—More Eaze. The album brings the audio snippets and found sounds into a landscape painted by picked guitars, electronic static, and pedal steel washes. The term I remember reading about the album is “noise ambient Americana,” and that feels accurate. This album is brief and very much worth the listen, even if it does not sound like it would be in your wheelhouse.

Vyva Melinkolya

Viva Melinkolya is the name of the project led by Angel Diaz. Her self-titled 2018 album is a swirl of poetic lyrics and slow, distorted guitars. Unlike many of the new shoegaze artists who have decided to play extremely slow, Diaz’s music is dynamic enough to actually keep my attention. I listened to her self-titled album when it came out and found myself astounded by the fact that she came out with a completely formed sound and aesthetic that was compelling. She has since followed up on this promise with her 2023 album Unbecoming as well as her collaborative album with newsletter favorite Midwife, Orbweaving. Throughout her music, you can hear the influence of Low and Grouper in the slow tempos and sonic world building, but you can also hear that she has her own ideas. As she continues to collaborate with artists such as Midwife and Ethel Cain, I would suspect that Diaz’s profile will continue to rise.

Vektroid

In case you either forgot or just did not know, vaporwave was a microgenre of electronic music that was popularized on the internet in the mid-2010s. Built off of chopped-and-screwed clips of soul and R&B songs as well as pitch-shifted muzak, the aesthetic could be seen and heard everywhere. Do you remember that time when everything had a shitty 90s aesthetic and there were a lot of pastels and neon? That was because of vaporwave.

In any case, the aesthetic often overtook the music, even though the music was actually quite good in its own right, sounding both campy and extremely ominous in equal measure. One of the musicians at the forefront of the movement is Ramona Andra Langley, who is better known as Vektroid. For the past decade plus, Langley has been chopping up muzak and samples to create a varied, intriguing body of work. Furthermore, Langley is one of the standard bearers for the genre. Her album, released under the alias Macintosh Plus, Floral Shoppe laid out many of the vaporwave’s techniques and aesthetic, and is still considered a hallmark of the form. Even though was released in 2011, it still sounds inventive now, even though it is an album of a very specific time on the internet.

Octo Octa

Continuing on the electronic music train, Maya Bouldry-Morrison releases house music under the name of Octo Octa. She is best known for her high-energy style, making music that drives people to the dance floor. She has released music for well-known tape label 100% Silk (If you are interested in underground dance music, I cannot recommend 100% Silk enough), HNYTRX, and T4T LUV NRG, the label she started with her partner DJ Eris Drew. While her first couple of albums display her struggles with her identity, the most recent two albums, Where Are We Going? and Resonant Body, are uplifting, the work of a woman who has freed herself of inner conflicts. They are both extremely engaging listens.

Arca

Arca is the stage name of Alejandra Ghersi Rodriguez, a Venezuelan musician. She started her career by releasing Xen and Mutant, two albums that push hard against the limits of what can or cannot be done in electronic music. Both albums actively play with ideas of gender and with sonic expression, pushing listeners into exciting, challenging spaces. Unsurprisingly, both of these albums were critically well received upon their releases. Arca continued to push boundaries with her Kick series. Over the course of these five albums, she pulls from reggaeton, IDM, and dubstep among others to make a sound of her own. It is challenging, but the journey is worth it. When she is not releasing her own music, you can hear her doing remixes of work by folks such as Ariana Grande and Addison Rae. She has also collaborated with numerous artists such as FKA Twigs (EP2 and LP1) and Bjork (Vulnicura and Utopia).

Kim Petras

The last person I’m going to talk about here is Kim Petras. If you are like me, the first—and maybe only—time you thought about her was “Unholy,” her collaboration with Sam Smith that was fine. For this reason, I sort of undersold her in my head. I put her here as an apology. I listened to her 2023 album Problematique. Is it the best album that I ever heard? No, not really. That said, it thumps. It is oriented straight at the dance floor and is extremely horny like Troye Sivan’s Something to Give Each Other and Janelle Monae’s The Age of Pleasure. (It is extremely fitting that all of these albums came out in the same year.) The beats are hard, and she has an excellent singing voice and a fun persona. I enjoyed my time with the album. So, if you are out there in the world reading this, Kim, I apologize for doubting your abilities.

It feels appropriate to end Women’s History Month with trans women. Next week, I am going to start an at-least-two-week series of explainer dispatches. When I was thinking about this thing that I write each week, I realize that I talk a lot about bands like the Go-Betweens and other Australian/New Zealand indie pop acts that most of you have never heard of. Next week is going to be a crash course into that scene. That part of the world has been turning out really interesting, fun indie pop for decades now. The best known label is certainly Flying Nun, but there are other interesting players such as Our Golden Friend and Bedroom Suck as well as bands that have worked their ways into deals stateside. I’ll get into a bit of that next week.

The week after that, I’m going to write about Mekons, a band that I think many of you will really like if you don’t know them already. They’ve been at it since the 1970s, and did come about during the first wave of British punk. Their music is not sonically punk, but it is spiritually punk. As well, they have one of the most interesting catalogs of music, as it is musically all over the place and there are a surprisingly low number of misfires, a true accomplishment for a group that has been working this long.

As always, share this with friends and colleagues and drop me a line if you have something positive to say or just want to be contrarian. Until sometime in the middle next week, peace out.