Russom, Gavilán Rayna

Russom, Gavilán Rayna

Secret Passage

W.25TH

Growing up in deindustrialized Providence, Rhode Island of the 1970s and 1980s provided NYC-based composer and interdisciplinary artist Gavilán Rayna Russom access to derelict subterranean spaces including the mile-long East Side Rail Tunnel. The tunnel’s reverberant darkness would produce distinctive sensory effects and host Russom’s formative experiences of interpersonal connectedness, liminality, transgender identity, anti-capitalist desire and state repression. Secret Passage—an absorbing, memoiristic work by Russom, whose synthesis-based practice fuses information and expression into organic wholes—draws on memories of “unsupervised autonomous zones where I tasted the possibilities of a world without surveillance,” as she writes in the liner notes. Inspired by “this beautifully neglected place,” the music resounds with ghostlike echoes and raw pulsations. Russom utilizes synthesizers, field recordings and voice to illustrate hallucinatory revelations of the city’s lightless undercarriage. Each track of Secret Passage, originally released as a limited cassette on Voluminous Arts, is dedicated to a friend—entwining personal liberation with collective discovery. The East Side Rail Tunnel has been inaccessible since the 1990s, the result of urban development and gentrification.

Russom, Gavilán Rayna

The Envoy

Ecstatic Recordings

“Gorgeous album of pulsing, beat-less urges by NYC transdisciplary artist Gavilán Rayna Russom, coming into her own with a distinguished solo debut album statement featuring the voice of Cosey Fanni Tutti and brass arrangements by downtown legend Peter Zummo. It's the second notable (if completely different) album in recent months, alongside Barker’s ‘Utility’, that keeps things fluid and propulsive while completely removing the kickdrum.  After decades exploring her sonic personality in various projects inspired by her deep immersion in NYC’s club and avant-garde scenes, Rayna uses ‘The Envoy’ as a vessel to firm up and convey her personal conclusions on intersections of gender and electronic music. Enriched with complex human experience and key influence from sci-fi writer Ursula K. Le Guin’s novel ’The Left Hand of Darkness’ - a book that strongly resonated with her due to its descriptions of an alien race with multiple sexual characteristics - the album is intended to realign misconceptions of Russom’s prescient early work such as 2005’s ‘The Days of Mars’ LP for DFA, which arguably foreshadowed a rise of beat-less and more ambiguous urges that are now commonplace in contemporary dance music, yet were at the time lumped in with retro-fetishist trends. With ‘The Envoy’ Russom returns to a 2019 music scene that’s better prepared with the politics of an emerging new world, and thus readied for her ideas to take hold in the public consciousness. Entwining Russom’s perspectives on gender, the occult, and spirituality, and how they relate to the body...