first and foremost, you can listen to my album "Saint Elizabeth" here:
https://ellaguro.bandcamp.com/album/saint-elizabeth
earlier this year i also did a talk called "What Doth Videogame" at the venue Boshi's Place here in Brooklyn that i worked on concurrently with the album. it's more about my personal artistic history than the subject of this post, but it's certainly connected and very much worth a watch. you can watch it here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6wgibG1vpA
my finances are not great after moving apartments and i'm more than a bit worn out in every way from the first several months of this year so i'd really appreciate any financial support right now - either on my bandcamp or on my patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/ellaguro. if you don't like orange, you can also read this post for free on my Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/ellaguro/posts/notes-from-161259685?pr=true
also i did wanna say thank you to Ether Diver of the blog "Other People's Music" for writing it up here:
https://www.etherdiver.com/2026/03/27/opm-the-pull-of-strange-pop/
you should check out this blog in general. it's really invaluable to have people out there who still take an effort to listen to and write up stuff people send them. we need much more of that in this world at this point. you have no idea how satisfying it is just to see SOMEONE write up some music i've done after years of cold emailing people to stone silence.
in addition: if you're reading this and have anyone you know who would be interested in writing about the album in some capacity (or are interested yourself), please reach out to them. it would be really nice to get more people to hear it outside of my usual circle, but i'm very much an outsider to the larger music sphere (whatever that even means at this point?) i know it's difficult for even plenty of established artists to get critical attention for anything music these days. but this is my work and it means a lot to me, so you can expect me to continue to be insufferable about it (and subsequent musical projects) in the next several years.
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like everything else on the internet, i remember online music discourse always being fractured. i first started reading online forums as a kid in the late 90's. you joined a discussion entirely based around whatever band or genre of music you were into. at first i looked at Yahoo fan forums for talk about Radiohead. by the 00's, that spun out to general teenage discourse around indie rock music - an interest i initially inherited from my older brother. indie rock had quickly become my thing since i discovered it. the idea that you could just be some schmuck in the middle of the country and make music that felt working class and relatable while also deeper, more expansive, more cosmic, more imaginative really struck a chord with me. i felt some kind of collective ownership over the success of bands like Grandaddy, The Flaming Lips, or Guided By Voices. they seemed so much like the underdog good guys. when Bowie namechecked a lot of these bands in the face of Carson Daly, the very avatar of grotesque American consumer culture to me at the time, on tv in 2002 i felt validated.
some of my years in the 00's on rock forums were very formative. they became foundational to my identity, and meant a lot at times when i was really struggling to make friendships in the flesh world. beyond my stable of bigger indie rock acts, i was introduced to a much greater pile of more obscure artists thanks to link sharing and music blogs. posting on there welcomed diving deep and searching for that elusive artist who might be exactly my thing. this also gave me new music to play every week for various radio shows i had throughout college. but the userbase was almost exclusively male, and there was the ever-present impossible to ignore "rockist" strain coloring all their tastes and perspectives on music as a whole. even while plenty of users had different takes on things, you were still certainly not getting the entire picture of what music could be, or represent, but often a snobbish facsimile. but that was sort of what you signed up for in the first place by existing on those forums, so maybe you were fine with that.
but by around 2010, i had begun to lose interest in where indie rock had been heading. the trendier aspects of that world world had begun to feel so pre-fab, so manufactured, a space made by and for rich kids. this coincided with me also losing touch with music discourse in general. and at that point i also became increasingly fixated on interrogating my own internal emotional state of being. graduating college and starting to transition had brought up a lot of buried trauma to the surface that was no longer possible to ignore. my security blanket was going through discographies of artists i had heard of already from friends but previously ignored: like Björk, Kate Bush, Tori Amos, Aphex Twin, Boards of Canada, Xiu Xiu, etc. it became much more difficult to talk to people about new music compared to when i was in college, so those artists served an outsized role in my life at the time. transitioning also made me question everything i had previously held dear, and take much more seriously the work of female artists i had been ignoring. i started dipping my toes more into electronic music too, which i had been reticent to do for many years (even as someone who made electronic music as a teenager) because i had an aversion to dance music. i also was just trying to learn how to articulate what i liked and disliked, and spending less time trying out stuff i wasn't as into.
a few years later, around 2013/2014, i genuinely tried to jump back into whatever new music discourse i could find. but something had changed - either internally, or just in the broader landscape in general. it didn't help that my one friend who was my way into what was happening in music criticism died tragically in a car accident in February 2013 (more on that later). it was also that a lot of discussion moved onto more centralized social media platforms. so i tried really hard to plug back in, but it was just never the same after that point. i had developed enough of my own personal sense of reality and right and wrong enough to where it just felt that much harder to trust anyone or feel deeply connected to anything in particular happening - other than small handfuls of random artists i might have discovered here or there.
the best way for me to articulate what changed for me over time is to maybe steal from my letterboxd review of the music documentary Pavements by Alex Ross Perry. when i was a young teenage music appreciator with strong opinions, the dichotomy between music for the masses and music for "the critics" loomed large for me. as my interest in music expanded in the late 90's, i experienced a gradually intensifying frustration with what most people around me were listening to. i was really put off by the schoolyard bully affectations of nu metal and the vapid shopping mall feeling of mainstream pop. the indie rock music i naturally gravitated more towards anyway was far more likely to get purchase from the critics - especially the upstart website Pitchfork Media. so i quickly became someone who aligned myself with whatever secondhand reverberations i could gain from the critics. of course, "the critics" were often wrong, or had a specific axe to grind and agendas they were pushing, like anyone else. but they still appeared to offer a much deeper and more substantive path into the world of music as a whole.
i think what is most dispiriting to me looking back is that engaging with the broader music sphere online in the 00's, i felt a sense that the internet was this tool that would unearth all of these previously underground cultural artifacts and have them be finally broadly celebrated. music blogs were a great venue to hear about some obscure psychedelic or post-punk record you'd never heard of for the first time in more detail. it felt inevitable that weirdos would get more exposure and that would become a substantially broadly recognized part of the music sphere. i guess it was a strange sort of "end of history" feeling - that artistry had triumphed over hollow commercialization and now was finally the time to give all this stuff its flowers. it felt inevitable this would only grow over time.
but it was all so short-lived. the sentiment among critics swung back hard into the other direction so fast. indie rock as a 'sound' felt like it was declining from its artistic peak of 1996-2006ish, and the uglier nature of how much casual misogyny and racism had proliferated over the years in the rock world became more apparent to me. but also it just became more beneficial in a more globally connected social media world for critics to attach themselves to what was already broadly popular in some way. it arguably became necessary, as media consolidation forced people aspiring for media careers to trend chase, regardless of how invested in any of it they might have been. there was a feeling that this alternative outsider vision of reality was simply too niche to be sustainable and had to be be thrown under the bus as an indulgence that couldn't be maintained at scale. the surface social justice concerns of some mainstream pop culture at the time i think gave a lot of people a built in justification for doing this - they could always retort that they were striking back against the hipster gatekeepers who stood against progress. "selling out" was officially no longer a real concern... until very much becoming one again this decade, of course. all of this is part of the reason why i still think about the 2010's in very bleak terms, even when many things about the surface culture at the time seemed more socially progressive and enlightened.
by now the critics are mostly gone: all the trade-offs they made didn't save their careers. and i don't particularly like discoursing about the state of music at all anymore, because i find the whole thing to be a sort of black hole. whatever critical conversations i can manage to tap into often feel so absurd, like some sort of hollow pantomime. either it's completely vapid insights driven by ragebait about 'industry plants' and why music is all worse now, or it's so far down the rabbit hole of a particular subcommunity so as to feel totally incomprehensible to anyone who is not an insider to those micro-universes. i appreciate younger journalists like Kieran Press-Reynolds trying to dig into realms of endless new subgenres in a more substantive way. but the question remains how much "there" is there a lot of the time. and i don't think it's an incomprehensibility specific to Gen Z either, but an across the board phenomenon of the internet subcommunities now driving culture. these subcommunities will actively close ranks and reinforce incomprehensible groupthink in so many ways. and it feels like there are so little attempts to synthesize anything anywhere into some sort of coherent overarching insight, because everyone's just thrown up their hands with the idea that there's too much music to possibly ever listen to.
there could be all kinds of potentially incredible, world-conquering art out there that will never find any sort of audience now. an artist could be the next Mozart and it feels like no one really gives a fuck. now that the critics are mostly gone, the burden is now the artist to make someone else have to care about it. the packaging has become so much more important than anything else, even in smaller niches. an artist must place themselves in some sort of context and shape themselves around the acceptable contours of that chosen context, even when they feel totally arbitrary and ridiculous. it's not about your ability to speak to a cultural landscape as a whole (which feels impossible), it's your ability to speak to and flatter to the niches around you. as if artists didn't have so much already on their plate!
the other option is to only just make art "for yourself", or as some kind of twee exercise in "self care" placed neatly into the void - a cozy coping mechanism instantly sucked into the vacuum of space. as i said in my blog several years back, the promise for most of us is: "make stuff and be free! (to vanish without a trace)." no guarantee anything you do won't get lost into the gaping maw of the internet almost immediately and no one will ever remember you. just appreciate the freedom you have with which to throw your time and energy into the void!
and it feels like no one really is interested in processing what any of this actually means - that any kind of hierarchies people might have grown up buying into about what is worthwhile or good art might be totally meaningless and in need of complete re-evaluation now that the dynamics of culture have totally changed. but there's no real possibility to have a broad conversation about that, because whatever platforms might have hypothetically fostered that kind of conversation have fractured immensely. even if that wasn't the case, there are far too many vested interests deeply entrenched in maintaining the structure and hierarchies of the past, regardless of how decayed things are in the present. some big important people in the music industry got really rich and powerful doing that, and they're not going to give that all up unless it's taken from them by force. the Michael movie shows to me how totally shameless rights holders will be in completely obfuscating any sort of truth about famous popular musicians in order to find more ways pump up the back catalog for some bucks. it's shameless and evil, but a lot of people in the world continue to willingly eat that shit up! oh fucking well!
so if you're some kind of progressively-minded person who is not a jerk and you occupy the realm of music, your response to this all might be an obsessive fixation on preserving the horizons of a lost past. music, to you, becomes this amalgam of different "cultures": who is representing what cultures, and who can be the best whisperer into what makes these cultures tick. even as the cultural archetypes you carry forth might be based on inaccurate, outdated, perhaps even orientalist assumptions - especially as the internet turns everything into a confusing mush. i say as someone frustrated how the image of LGBTQ+ culture in the US for many people is permanently stuck on Paris is Burning and not the terminally internet-poisoned anime-loving furries who seem to embody the strongest undercurrents of queer culture at this point. if you're fixated on this idea of late 20th century DIY, of underground clubs and zines and alt weeklies, nothing that comes from the internet is ever going to feel as real to you.
and because of this, i feel like i understand what young Bob Dylan must have felt as part of the progressive Greenwich Village folk scene in the early 60's. like hey - it's great that you care so much about these traditional folk songs and how they embody the sentiments of the working class proletariat, but how about i write my own? in the face of destructive new technologies, why must we cling to this tradition like a life raft as we watch the future horizons fade away into the background? why so much tiptoeing? why can't we throw away the rulebook and write our own stories? why must you continually tell me "no, not like that?"
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| Pete Seeger on "Rainbow Quest" |
i know, sure, i know, it's all not so simple. Pete Seeger and other similar figures function as a vessel for preserving and carrying forth old folk tradition that would disappear otherwise. watching old Rainbow Quest episodes is a comforting activity, especially in an era of destructive techno-nihilism. it's cool to have this centuries old continuity you can tap into at any time in your art that goes back long before all the current industry bullshit we're dealing with solidified. and the mistake so many new art movements make is believing they can totally break from the past while they inevitably end up repeating all of its same mistakes. continuity is completely necessary and the algorithmic internet is a terrifying context-destroying machine that threatens to turn the entire history of struggle into nonsensical slush.
but the cultural fixation on idealizing the recent past feels like it has reached absurd proportions lately. in the musical realm there is simply no time to have the conversation about how much the idea of musical genre is a marketing construct created for and perpetuated by the recorded music industry to make money off different demographics. it's an extremely flawed state of being that a lot of artists had to find their own way around navigating. this state of being was then instilled with so much meaning and romanticism because a lot of big important artists were seen to embody it. so i just don't know why there's so many people treating the recorded music industry like it's any kind of community of equal peers, when this deep romanticism many fans feel about these artistic figures mostly just seems to make a lot of money for the people at the top.
some people in the mid 20th century set up the structure of what the recorded music industry was that we're not really allowed to change at some fundamental level. but that's okay, because those artists were so great, and we must have so much respect for them. there's simply no other way. they're our buddies. even if the world they occupied feels increasingly totally alien to the one we exist in. as if trying to bring in something totally new, trying to be honest to your own reality, trying to even exist in the present at all shows a lack of respect for what came before, and is a reminder of your own cosmic irrelevance.
and lest you work through that feeling, don't forget that there is always the social media panopticon: always judging, always monitoring for weakness, always looking for reasons to point out why you or someone else has failed to live up to these standards that have been set long before you. even if you're not online and not witnessing the resentment machine whirring into motion, someone out there with a phone camera who is very much is tapped into all of that will be. it may be humiliating, it may be why the cultural sphere is not only weakly responding to fascism: but reinforcing it in so many different ways. but it's still what we have to do now! isn't this just the same refrain of all aspects of public life now?
and i think it drives this perverse impulse, like it's still your civic duty to go along and be a part of the conversation about popular music, even if you don't like it or find it immensely alienating. even if it's in a heavily diminished state. if only just to be a part of the conversation: to feel like you can share any sort of reality with someone else. if someone else cares about it, you should care about it too right? even if it's all built on sand. to do so otherwise would be positively antisocial!!!!
but in actuality it leads to an absurd toxic shit slurry of hostility and resentment. people feel like they have to talk about things they don't want to talk about, and it just engenders extreme anger in them. to whom does all of this even serve anymore? no one seems to even know. if we're really in the post consensus-reality world, why not burn it all down and start over? what would you really lose at this point? some work of great artists, some history? sure: that'd be sad, but it doesn't make much sense to preserve it anyway if all that really serves is just to reinforce the power of a small handful of people who made themselves very rich off it.
basically, it feels like the music discourse has never been worse. and i just don't have respect for that whole landscape. i can't channel the awed wonder so many people seem to have about most musicians - because it seems to have way more to do now with power and celebrity and visibility than anything even approximating artistry anymore. the only thing that really makes sense to me right now creatively is to push ahead and try to explore artistic territory i haven't before, and see where that takes me. i have a pathological need to set the world on fire while no one's listening in. and to be honest, i really don't care about if my existing audience wants to follow me down this rabbit hole or not, because i'm only getting older and the world is only getting stupider. it's increasingly the only thing that's giving me any semblance of meaning.
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| album cover for Thelonius Monk's Underground |
i've been thinking about something Max Alper (aka Peretsky) said a few months back over on bluesky:
https://bsky.app/profile/peretsky.bsky.social/post/3mh74psk7kc2y
"i
think in today's day and age, our definition of 'underground' or 'counter-cultural' art scenes has to center around whether or not it's
placating to the 'content' definition, i.e. mass distribution on social
media and streaming platforms. it requires thinking small and not about
virality. it's why i stress the need to stop worrying about genre exclusivity,
it's such a relic of the past when everyone from rappers to first chair
violinists feel the need to make camera facing promo video content for
IG. IMO if you're not playing that game, you're taking part in
counterculture, period."
our reality at this moment in history is the big overarching fantasy of any artist is to
passively post something you made online and magically stumble into a kind of virality which will somehow transport you into a different strata of success. i experienced this fantasy among indie game developers in the
early 2010's: it seemed like every person making a commercial independent game were all formulating in their minds how to make the kinds of money that would allow them to just drop out: of obligations, both social and financial, or of just
life in general. to retire before thirty. this fantasy is not just inherent to independent
games, of course, but to internet stardom in general.
all of this helped spawn a parasitic class of marketing gurus who purport to offer secrets to navigating this system in order to get to that imagined strata of success. the fantasy is always much less about making any kind of positive social or cultural transformation with your art, and much more about being able to eventually accrue enough passive income to remove yourself from the obligation of having to engage with, well, anyone else. this work is your one way ticket to permanently dropping out. it allows you to exit an increasingly disturbing world filled with nonsensical sludge behind as a problem for everyone else to deal with. whether or not anyone's ever able to actually do that
is a different question: but the fantasy is compelling enough for people to pursue it blindly regardless.
but particularly what
struck me in Alper's posts is the thought about "genre exclusivity". not to sound like a libertarian, but i am frequently flummoxed that online platforms conceptualized by hardcore techno-libertarians have sort of destroyed the pursuit of general artistic excellence as a thing to aspire to and replaced it with a celebration of one's ability to fit exactly within a particular kind
of already developed niche. when general virality no longer feels very desirable (because it exposes you to the public mockery of social media), what replaces is it the pursuit of aspirational lifestyle content. the music internet of today is filled with synthtubers who seem to know all the right gear and have just the right lighting setup but haven't been involved with creating any particularly memorable music. or performers on Instagram Reels who are technically very accomplished at their instrument of choice but once again, never seem to manage anything very interesting or distinctive with it. but it's fine, because we don't live in a landscape that seems to want or aspire to anything more than be visible. just the ability to throw a huge volume of content out there into the void and look the part to your audience seems to be more important.
which is why i think Alper is right: anything that consciously rejects this approach, regardless of who or where it's coming from is the only thing it really makes sense to call "underground" now. if you've actively avoided participating in this ecosystem described above: congratulations, you are a part of the new counterculture - whether you know it or not. it's a good way to reframe something that a lot of people interpret as laziness or exhaustion under the current ecosystem. this jives with something i read from Stephen Gilmurphy aka thecatamites at the end of last year that expands further on the idea of underground:
https://harmonyzone.org/blog/posts/year%20of%20the%20cow/
"...maybe in art 'underground' just
means a shiver - of premonition, that it could happen to you, of memory,
the things you can never afford to forget. necessarily privileged, the
domain of those who can still afford to speak and have something to
lose. but registering in miniature some felt change in the relationship
to public life itself. not necessarily a dramatic change, more like, a
cooling - the sizing up, costing out of possibilities that might once
have seemed inherent to the world. a narrowed sense of what to expect
from other people, from yourself. you grow to assume the chill in the
air, you no longer remember what it was to walk outside without a coat.
part of the attraction to me of art that gets called experimental is in a refusal of these terms. to be brash and noisy, to make leaps that aren't explained in the assumption that someone out there will get it regardless, to refuse the kind of costing in which we might say each new idea must be paid for with the dutiful recycling of three received ones. to make it new, be absolutely modern - whatever that means, now that the modern can feel like the feudal with an app store paint job."
the existence of an underground is an absolute necessity in order to draw a path forward for any sort of new horizons towards a better reality in deeply stifling, oppressive times. but also: i see Stephen express a sort of frustrated ambivalence about the fact that it's not ever really enough, nor has it ever been enough. the history of left-wing struggle tends to be defined by these tiny pyrrhic victories, utterly dwarfed by the scale of historical events surrounding them. the walls always seem to be closing in on one dream of a better world or another. it's cool that this great middle finger to Thatcherism, The Jam's "Going Underground" (which Stephen mentions in his piece), went to number 1 in the UK: but it didn't really stop anything that was about to happen. history is overflowing with so many examples like that - little victories that still seemed to do nothing to alter the overall arc of history.
anyone who is trying to make work that cuts against the destructive power of these anti-democratic movements invariably finds it difficult to just exist without constantly being confronted by the ignorance, the hostility, the violence of them. it's lucky to be remembered at all in the future, let alone influence reality in some materially positive way in the present. and the celebratory fanfare you might hope deeply principled figures would receive after the fact often just never comes; the people who sold out the promise of a better future for material comfort in the present often make it out just fine in the end. amorality may feel unconscionable to anyone with the capacity to show compassion, but we broadly make excuses for it all the time from many of our most successful and beloved figures. they're flawed people, they did what anyone else would do. meanwhile those who bothered to stand against the cruel destruction of these systems at great personal sacrifice get frequently ignored and downplayed, because maybe they don't embody the kind of aspirational success we want to identify ourselves with in the same way.
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| album cover for 1996's Boys For Pele by Tori Amos |
speaking of "a cooling", Tori Amos had a song called "Cooling", a b-side that was never properly recorded (though a live version was on the second CD of her 1999 album "To Venus and Back") but is a favorite among fans of hers.
Tori, to me, is the master of simultaneously coming off a bit frivolous and baffling in interviews and then suddenly snapping back into focus and abruptly hitting you something that cuts incredibly deep. this song embodies that: it has this extremely mournful tone, as if it's trying to identify a pain you can't really put into words, but the lyrics are a bit evasive. the opening verse contains the really evocative line "i still can't believe Speed Racer is dead" - like we're in the aftermath of the death of a heroic fantasy and we're forced to pick of the pieces. but most of the song appears to be about a romantic relationship running out of steam, told through some of Amos's typical airy fairy lyrical abstractions ("But Fire thought she'd really rather be water instead") which are not bad images but maybe too clever by a half. but that's just me!
but beyond its most obvious textual interpretation, i take this song as a reflection that in 1998 you really felt the chill of this idea of an "Alternative" culture fully take hold. any feeling of initial new horizons 90's alternative might have offered honestly seemed to sour before it even really came to fruition, but certainly felt highly co-opted by 1998. the whole 90's felt like an expression of frustration about the inevitable co-optation of everything that was going to come, until it eventually just ran out of steam. interesting and important art got made in that period, but popular music and popular culture in both the US and UK seemed to become very angry and disillusioned in the immediate years before 9/11, in a way that's been mostly forgotten. especially compared to some of the more fun-loving Y2K futurism that seems to be what's idealized from that era now. here in the US in 1999 you had the Seattle WTO protests and famous Canadian Naomi Klein's first book No Logo which were the first inklings of the left-wing resistance to neoliberal globalization: one we've seen play out much more openly in the past 15 years or so since the Occupy movement.
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| from the music video for "Risingson" by Massive Attack |
i've talked about it on this blog ad nauseam, but that period of about 1997-2001 is one that still sticks with me. the best art of that time was both very futuristic and forward-looking but also kind of bleak and dystopian. you saw this slow inkling of an idea emerge that maybe the overground, the popular culture in general was the real collective hallucination? something a confluence of forces, emotional and spiritual and technological and material, came together to manifest, but could not hold for very long. an acceptable space in the mainstream was being carved out for media actually trying to anxiously grapple with the falseness of this surface reality. but the walls were closing in on this art world, and an oncoming authoritarian police state was about to bust down the door and take over, just like it does in the video for Massive Attack's "Risingson" off their 1998 masterpiece Mezzanine. so maybe the nostalgic longing for this era now comes from an unconscious understanding from hindsight that this small window of allowable self-interrogation could only exist within a very particular window of time before it had to go away?
i didn't understand any of that as someone just coming of age during that time. what i did understand is that a lot of art from around the year 2000 imprinted on me - and then it seemed to become suddenly socially unacceptable to do what a lot of that art did anymore. all this existential angst processed by art of the era seemed suddenly seemed simply unallowable after 9/11, and it was now time for a full-on escape into the realm of fantasy and an idealized past. inevitably i found plenty of new artists to get into afterwards, and life moved on. but it never felt like we returned to that earlier self-interrogating place in culture. perhaps around 2018-2020 might have been the small exception, where it seemed like that broad cultural reckoning might be happening again with #MeToo and #BLM and the Bernie campaign, before reality violently snapped us back even more dramatically and brutally than before.
over the last year and a half i've felt a lot like Thelonious Monk camped out in the underground resistance bunker, or Massive Attack holed up in their decaying trap house as the fascist goon squad breaks down the doors. i was completely hunkered down in my room working on the album throughout January and February, only really taking breaks to eat or intermittently rewatch old Simpsons episodes to try and inspire myself in some way. i barely shared what i made with anyone. one roommate at the time i wasn't even talking to anymore. Zohran's New York is one of the better places for people like me to be, i guess, but it's not exactly the most comforting place to go outside in either - especially not in the midst of this winter's historic chill.
and you know, i really would like to believe in the fantasy of Zohran's New York as a city we can all call home, but that is not the brutal reality most of the time. i never participated in the idea of New York as a haven for aspirational young twentysomething weirdos, because i moved here in my early 30's - but most of the people i know who did live that life seem to feel bitter and burned out from what did (or in most cases, didn't) transpire from it. New York is a city that cultivates the image of a cultural epicenter while also being as hostile to actually accommodating that as any city could conceivably be. the culture that happens here, has to - it's the default inextricable part of the city's self-image at this point. but it's always in a desperately precarious state, and propped mostly by goodwill and a feeling of needing to preserve what was rather than push for the new. and all the club culture that used to be a necessary space of survival for the city's underground, especially in the LGBTQ+ community, has over time became much more a signifier of clout and wealth and prestige than anything else. you're reminded how little you truly own anything if you make culture in this city - you're just leasing the space temporarily until someone younger, better looking, or with more money comes to kick you to the curb. and, i'm sorry, but it's just hard for me to feel much of any connection to all of it. beyond grinning and bearing it so that i can live around a bunch of other people i know, i guess.
i've found my own little spots from several years living here in Brooklyn, but everything still feels kind of impenetrable to me. and whatever refuge online used to offer, even the supposedly more left wing bluesky, is not exactly the most welcoming place for artists. bluesky is more a place for lib/left adjacent 30 and ups to anxiously vent about the state of the world, while being mostly confused or disinterested in new art that does pop up. regardless of the context, over time i've felt that the world doesn't really have the resources to accommodate the kind of art i want to make. there was a long time where i felt very bitter about this, or felt that maybe this state of thing is just what i deserved because i was too lazy to manage to say the right things or wasn't the right kind of person to pull together the right people to make it work.
after the last several years, i realized that it just doesn't even really matter anymore. when it's late 2024 and you're still broke and pushing forty under a government that aggressively wants people like you dead, what do you have to really lose anymore? any kind of passing relevance you might have had in the past is long gone. so it's time to start digging those holes underground. the day is today, the time is now. time for me to, like Stephen, start playing to the cow.
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| from the 1967 Ed Sullivan tv performance of "Sunday Will Never Be The Same" by Spanky & Our Gang |
more than anything, Saint Elizabeth is me trying to grapple with the death of Boomer culture - what was any of that all about, anyway? my parents were teenagers during the 60's and i grew up idealizing that decade by proxy without understanding much of anything about it. i only felt a whiff of the dreamy reverberations left over, of possibilities that once might have existed but that had long mutated into something else, or had been foreclosed on for unclear reasons. and now, people of my parents' age are starting to die out and taking the culture they came of age into to the grave with them. what comes after to replace its legacy after every single totem of the 60's counterculture finally dies? as of right now there's no clear future coming up over the horizon. and i think the lack of horizons now can be seen in the increasingly anxious and sunken faces of many rich and famous people. we live in a dead mall society stripped of its parts. and we're still trotting out culture for public rituals that might theoretically have represented some kind of undercurrent in society in the past but now seems to serve no purpose other than as a hollow display of wealth and power. so i don't feel like it's really sunk in what will happen after, and people are maybe too scared to even talk about it.
the broad counterculture the sixties produced feels like an total impossibility now for a variety of reasons, most of them cost-of-living related. the belief that music or art alone could spark a revolution has also seemed powerfully naive for a long time in an age of mass media oversaturation. but i also don't know how you could ever hope to have any sort of revolution without a particular canon of songs or art associated with it. if we are to ever to collectively get out under the thumb of our right wing billionaire overlords, how could we ever hope to unite behind something other than the ragebait punditry that is now our number one most visible thing in culture? maybe gooner podcaster content slop is just who we are now. but is that what we really want to be to be? perhaps you said yes to this, but forgive me if i'm not particularly convinced the boomers were any more actually virtuous or worthy of having the culture they did than millennials or zoomers or generation alpha are. that's not something you will be able to convince me of.
i don't know if i was just born stubborn, or what: but my artistic birth on more fandom-based online communities like ocremix.org was the opposite of any context that existed to cultivate folks towards having the sort of radical countercultural consciousness i always wanted to embody. i won't say the experience i had wasn't invaluable in many ways or that i would trade it for other things. but artistically the atmosphere of ocremix was pretty conservative. most artists wanted to prove they were actual musicians worthy of being taken seriously in a general context, so displays of technical skill and competence were the name of the game. even if it was for making goofy sounding chiptune-adjacent music, it had better be incredibly dense and compositionally-complex goofy chiptune-adjacent music!! basically everything about the social dynamics of that space in hindsight make sense as something that helped produce the current era of online fandom culture, but makes no sense to exist in if you were trying to birth forth this image of radical transgressive artistry i always identified with.
perhaps that's the joke of it all, for me. standing up in the face of something aggressively not meant to be used the way you're using it for. of course, in the end, it's still just that: a joke. and by now the joke has gone on way too long.
i could go on about my various failed attempts to get this sort of more ambitious musical project off the ground, and if you're someone who knows me you've probably heard it a bunch of times before - so i'll try and keep it shorter. i’d been idly desiring to do an album of my own songs for a very long time, after i did some song material in college that was pre/right around when i started to transition. i got into doing music for videogames in part because i was just interested in the larger artistic possibilities the space of indie games afforded, but in part because i wanted to pursue a larger career in music and thought that might be a way "in". i'm not sure why i ever thought that would ever be the case, but at age 22 it's hard to say no to pursuing the one space where you've ever had any kind of audience. and my first real project i worked on was the music for the flash game Dys4ia, which to this day (along with Crypt Worlds, which i did the sound fx and music for) probably got more visibility than anything else i was involved with.
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| Vice Magazine cover by Shintaro Kago |
i've explained this on social media before, but the artist name "ella guro" is kind of a portmanteau of two things: the song "Ella Guru" by Captain Beefheart and "ero guro", the Japanese art style (there is also a visual artist who goes by "ella guru" but i don't really know anything about her). i adopted this name around age 22 and didn't put a great deal of thought into it initially. eventually the idea of an underground cult arty pop singer character, a sort of inversion of Lady Gaga (same number of letters and syllables) who had an explicit surreal body horror theme formed in my head. i am a mild Lady Gaga fan, but i think it always bothered me that she wasn't actually a trans woman like the initial right-wing scaremongering about her suggested, or that her music wasn't nearly as far-out as her sometime choices in outfits.
to be honest i've always been surprised that ero guro and artists like Shintaro Kago didn't become a more mainstream thing in pop culture in general. it seems pretty much just as subcultural now as 15 years ago. i liked that imagery. not just because it pleases my inner edgelord or whatever, but also that i personally identified with the surreal body horror aspect of this as someone who had just begun processing child sexual abuse and transitioning for the first time. and outside of that, i literally had someone assign the famous Shintaro Kago Vice Magazine cover to my artist profile prior to transitioning on Last.fm without me doing anything, which is how i found out about any of this in the first place. so i felt like an identity that was given to me in some way.
of course, that concept i had for this sort of musical artist never really got realized, and i just adapted it as a general alias. i'm not sure i'd ever be bold enough to figure out how to make this sort of character work in performances in person. maybe the idea i had in my head at the time was a bit shallow and one-dimensional anyway. and assuming a weird username are the sort of things you do in normie world in order to keep some semblance of yourself still intact while your fantasy conception of yourself slowly fades into the background. and over time it was mostly just funny to still have a username referencing Captain Beefheart and ero guro in a lot of psuedo-respectable contexts where people would never get what the hell either of those things were.
the biggest reason that whole pop project never got off the ground is i have had a massive amount of insecurity and confidence issues when it came to my voice, and performing in public in general, for a very long time. some of it was that i've always had issues with performance anxiety: i played a little piano and especially cello growing up, but i had a tendency to bomb auditions due to nervousness. when i did get into making music on the computer i stuck to instrumental music made on a DAW partly as a result of that - because it felt like it was the only space where i could control what i wanted to do, and make something sound like what i wanted it to be. and the idea of taking that DAW music outside into any other context just seemed completely inconceivable with my meager amount of resources and connections to the broader musical sphere.
the other part of all of this is that i was pretty terrified of being visible and my speaking/singing voice being scrutinized as not sufficiently "female" after i transitioned. maybe some of this was also my own feeling of despair about not sounding sufficiently feminine to myself, whatever that means, as well. but i also felt i had way more to contribute than just being trans, and i didn't want that to be a focus of everything. the idea of my being getting reduced to that is quite frankly humiliating given all that i feel i have to contribute to the world (or really any trans person does, for that matter). i also just didn't even really understand who i was as a person until around age 30, so it was hard for me to make sense of a lot of the feelings i had about myself. so i just forged ahead on doing other stuff while i waited to somehow magically conjure the confidence to actually performing, someday, somehow, pushing that vocal stuff aside as a problem to deal with later. meanwhile time ticked on by, like it tends to do.
i said 13 years ago on this blog that pop music was what i really wanted to try and pursue, not videogames. it can be painful to read back over stuff from that era for me. a lot has changed in the world since then, and i certainly have a different understanding of myself now than i used to. but has that feeling ever really changed for me? not really. i mean, it's kind of been a funny joke to me to be some videogames person when in my head i should have had some kind of music career: if having a music career wasn't an equally, if not even more embarrassing, thing to have at this point. i think i'm mostly okay with my current state of being now, maybe not financially. but my point is that music never was some kind of dalliance or side thing for me even if i was never able to really put it together in a way that didn't feel compromised.
during the first half of the 2010's i was pretty adrift in following the music world. eventually around late 2016, i started to connect a little more with underground electronic music happening at the time. i discovered labels like Orange Milk Records and Hausu Mountain. i also met several people online adjacent to that scene in a big group DM, a few whom i'm still friendly with now. but that experience was also really disheartening for many reasons: including that some notable people in the space were outright fascists. an experience trying to work with an online label trying to release my instrumental electronic album LP ZERO was a disaster. the politics and actions of a few of these folks caused a huge drama in that scene, but i was way too tertiary to anyone to really feel attached to any of the people around. i never was that much of a participant to begin with, so i mostly just checked out after that. later on outside that scene, there were a couple times were i encountered one or two pseudo famous/connected people in music world that didn't really materialize into anything. i hit my 30's by that point, and was always teetering on the edge of giving up trying to pursue any of this for good.
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| Death's Dynamic Shroud performing at Electronicon 2023 in Queens |
but i had also started to become a little more comfortable with my singing voice by the late 2010's. so the idea of finally doing this sort of art pop album really started to hang over my head as the pandemic hit and i became even more conscious of time slipping by. the concept of several of the songs on Saint Elizabeth came about around like 2021/2022, though many of the instrumental snippets they came from are much older than that. in late 2022 i was more inspired after seeing my musical acquaintances (and fellow Ohioans) Death’s Dynamic Shroud put out a more ambitious album of songs called Darklife and just generally being insanely prolific with their Mixtape club after mostly only doing instrumental/sampled music for years. that was a big sign for me that i actually needed to sit down and do this, and i felt like i kept receiving other scattered signs from the universe over the next year.
i finally started working on the album properly around mid 2023: mostly just messing with making beats, because i felt like my drum programming hadn’t been up to snuff since i used to do more of it in my ocremix days. between 2023 and 2024, i only managed finishing three tracks ("terrible town", "blank cassette", and "intensive care") and wrote some lyrics. but i still just felt like i had such a major mental block about working on music. in mid 2025, i went back to the well of what i used to do in college and quickly wrote a bunch of songs on guitar and whatever other instruments i had lying around. it was a great exercise in getting to feel really productive without a whole ton of effort, even if only one of those songs actually ended up on the final album (''the known"). i'm sure more will show up on subsequent releases.
finally around late last year, i got invited to do a talk (which became "What Doth Videogame", linked at the top of this post) for the DIY space Boshi’s Place here in Brooklyn. i tried to get them to graft a listening party for my album as an excuse to finally finish it, which they did. starting around the beginning of January i holed up in my bunker and took on the project on in as digestible chunks as i could handle in the amount of time i had so that i wouldn’t feel like the end result was compromised. something about the potential public humiliation of not getting something done meant that i was able to finish both the talk and album though. it made me wonder what the big fucking deal was that i was being so precious and couldn’t do this all along!
it's really hard to know how to write about something you've made because there's a desire to just want it to speak for itself. is "Saint Elizabeth" supposed to be me, or someone else? hopefully that's not something i really need to get into. i have always felt a conflict between wanting to be in the David Lynch realm of not talking about your work at all and someone who feels the need to speak up for what i'm doing, because no one else will. to be quite honest (for me at least) being a mysterious artist is a luxury i'm not sure i've ever quite been able to fully afford. maybe i also feel especially allergic to all the aura and mystique around what a friend once called "The Male Genius" as well. or sentient floating orb avatar guys online who try to cultivate a cult of personality and talk about everything like they've just seen the face of God. besides, being annoying about your interests in a way that's personal and not the compulsory photogenic social media promotion-forward way pop stars are pressured to do, can be fun to do. i wouldn't want to give that up.
i have aggressively been made aware throughout my life how little ability i have to change another person's mind, regardless of what i say or do. i have been in many situations that escalated in spite of me trying to be what i thought was a good person or do the right thing as much as i had it within me to do so. i have really struggled with this and over and over again i have come face to face with the fact that at some level, there is nothing you can really do to change people's perceptions of you. perhaps it's one reason why i'm so needing to control everything around my art - at least it makes it harder for people to twist what i say, who they think i am, or where i come from. they probably still will anyway, but at least i can feel like it's on them at that point.
so i feel very much like i'm operating inside my own universe at this point. but if i did have to draw lines of artistic connection to one thing, in spite of not really belonging to a particular home artistically, i broadly still feel more aligned with this idea of underground electronic music than anything else. whether it's vaporwave, hyperpop, chiptune, plunderphonics, digital fusion, etc - so these different underground digital music genres have offered something valuable for me. it felt like they seemed to genuinely be providing some kind of novel way forward. they also were things i could at least connect back to my own teenage experiences doing arrangements of and making videogame music without feeling horribly embarrassed or out of sorts about it. i didn't have to reject, or renounce stuff i did growing up for the sake of cool points. especially the idea that it could be reclaimed not just as some aspect of fandom culture, but as some kind of weird artistic DIY mutation of those things (which is how i always saw it to begin with!) really means a lot to me.
when stretched further, i could connect them back to punk and indie rock in terms of ethos and approach, even if not directly in sound. if you're someone like me, the lesson you took from being a teenage indie rock fan was about the spirit and attitude of the music, and not that you needed to be a rock band. my musical interests have probably always been far more in the Björk direction than the Superchunk one, but the DIY approach of indie rock will forever be the underlying force in it for me. i think that's where i'd like to keep it. guitar music feels like too limiting a palette to me to try and stick to for too long, even though i admit it's more accessible to translate to live music.
i
still feel like if there's such a thing as a "next big thing" in music
in this incredibly fractured age, if that's at all possible, it's coming out of underground electronic music. of course, a lot of these genres have been around awhile, and already had their flirtations with the mainstream. hyperpop particularly has had various "moments" of mainstream attention before kind of dissipating into a meaningless signifier now - maybe a bit like
"new wave" did in the 80's. and the genre always felt a bit too preppy for me, to be honest. the 'vaporwave' artists i am
still into now like Death's Dynamic Shroud or Firetoolz or Vektroid or
Equip or Nmesh mostly couldn't be described as doing anything that really sounds
like pure 'vaporwave' anymore, and i'm not sure what i make has anything to do with vaporwave or any of them anyway.
chiptune i've been the closest to for the longest time just because of my proximity to videogames, even though my music sounds the least like it of any of these. it also seems to have fallen a bit out of relevance as anything but a generic signifier of "videogame music". though i think "digital fusion", or tracker music, or whatever you want to call it has had
more resilience and i see tons of new music in that space crop up all the time.
anyway, the
point that i'm making is - even if what i'm making doesn't fit neatly
in any of those scenes or categories, i still feel broadly more aligned
with those spaces than any others at this point. they at least have
seemed to be closer to the ground. but even then, i sometimes chafe how how much that music tends towards uncritically escapist aesthetics or moods, when what i'm doing is more overtly obviously "political" in content in many ways. i sometimes derisively refer to abstract electronic music that's mostly
about aesthetic as "cube music" - like it's music primarily made for
geometric shapes. i like the sounds of electronic music much more than pure traditional folk music, but i also like the idea of writing songs about things.
but also, i'm not sure i'd be able to tap into whatever infrastructure of these spaces even if i tried. like what online scene could i really throw myself into so people outside my usual limited audience will notice? what context, what subcultures can i pretend to be a part of that sound respectable or interesting enough to some gatekeeper out there? do i have to play into people's existing biases in some way enough to flatter them to get them to notice? it's one thing to drag yourself through the mud in a humiliating self promotion ritual with some kind of clear goal in mind, it's another to do it without even really knowing what direction you're going in with any of it. that's the problem with trying to chart your own course artistically. any method i can think of to position myself for more visibility within a space would be utterly exhausting to me and everyone around me, and i'm not sure it woud result in much. and certainly forget about having any resources to promote myself in a more general, industry-wide sense - i'm broke, i'm tired, i'm pushing 40, and having actual resources seems to be increasingly only for a privileged few... nepo babies, as they're called now.
when my friend and former college roommate Collin Anderson, who used to write for the now defunct music website tinymixtapes as "unicornmang", passed away in a car accident in 2013, his partner and family found some work in progress recordings on his computer. in lieu of anyone else i guess they decided to send them to me. they just sat on my hard drive for years, because i really had no idea what to do with them. while working on this album, i thought about how i used to tell him how important making a big album like this was. to honor him in some strange sort of way, i decided to throw snippets of all three of those tracks - "Long Drive", "Fading Into Everything" and "Last Time" - on the couple ambient/instrumental tracks i made for this album: "intensive care" and "end of the trail". you could interpret both of these tracks as being about death so i think it's sort of appropriate - both him and tinymixtapes are dead. he probably would have been fascinated and confused by their use.
this whole experience, and some others (like my use of some specific samples very personal to me, or quoting much older bits of music of mine in a different context) are among many reasons why i was very adamant about doing everything around this album completely by myself. it felt important for the music to be as specific to me as possible. i also wanted to make sure there could be no question about my skill or ability to put something together that was up to my standard, outside influence from someone else. perhaps this is control freak behavior, and that's what makes it extra hard to translate into the context of existing music scenes or figure out how to perform it live. but i guess it doesn't matter so much anymore. and i wanted to set a template for myself for something i could be fully proud of. which i am!
eventually it started to feel fun (other than recording vocals anyway...) to piece the whole audio tapestry together. there's almost a feeling like you're cheating, in the best way possible, by doing it in the way you are. combining lo-fi aesthetics with hi-fi sounds, or writing extremely weird sounding but also very direct "protest" songs in a realm that's usually more for more escapist 'vibey' electronic music. or making long ambient spoken word pieces with a boatload of strange plundered samples, or any other thing i might have not ever considered doing in this exact way before felt fun because of how much it felt i was getting away with something. i'm sad i didn't believe enough in myself to spend more time doing this, or was too invested in the idea of how you were supposed to make any of this stuff work, or thought no one would want to listen to it.
this project ended up being reasonably fun to do in spite of how exhausting it was, i feel like i can definitely manage several more in this vein. whether it leads to anything career-wise, i guess that's a different story. but like i say in the song "blank cassette" - the car is still running, and not a moment too soon. the door finally swing open for me after all of these years and i'll be damned if i don't walk through it at this point.
the old world is going to die regardless of anything you or i say or do about it. perhaps one day there will be another chance to collectively save the idea of music from whatever irradiated remains of the recorded music industry are still choking it out. or maybe not, i dunno. in the meantime, i'll keep digging some more tunnels underground.
- liz
