Upstate NY
July 2014
Monday, September 03, 2018
Thursday, August 28, 2014
Friday, May 09, 2014
This coming Sunday is Mother's Day. It is a day that marks exactly one year since my mother suffered the hemorrhagic stroke that was the beginning of the end of her life, although we didn't know that then.
This time last May my band FLOWN was working hard on the release of our self-titled 7", a beautiful document of a project that has been wrought out of our collective experience with loss, pain, love, and the need for catharsis and transformation through songcraft, ritual and HEAVY FUCKING METAL.
We chose Hecate, the triple goddess of the crossroads and the liminal spaces between life and death, as the face we turned to the world on the cover of our record.
Hecate stood watch this year as I sat by my mother's side in the hospital, communed with her spirit in the kitchen, wept and sang for her with my feet in the mud of a North Carolina summer. Hecate stood watch as my bandmates sang for my mother at her funeral, and Hecate stood watch as my partner's mother left this world just a month after my mother died.
Hecate also stands watch as my guitar player, muse and dear friend Margot carries and prepares to birth her first child, who is due to arrive in this world sometime next week. Hecate stands watch as my drummer, birthday twin, muse and best friend Kate carries and prepares to birth her first child, who is due to meet this world this fall.
This Mother's Day, FLOWN will be performing as a part of Naama Tsabar's piece Without at the Frieze Art Fair on Randall's Island, an architectural intervention turned music festival curated by Mindy Abovitz and Tom Tom Magazine. Tsabar has removed the floor from a booth inside the fair and used it to create an outdoor stage that will feature a mini-music festival comprised of underground bands with female percussionists, thus activating the space outside the confines of the fair tent and leaving an empty space inside.
FLOWN offers our performance on this stage as a testament to the presence of the goddess at these intersecting crossroads of birth and death, presence and absence, joy and sorrow, grief and love. AKA my mom died a year ago and Margot might go into labor on stage.
I am so grateful that I get to spend this day playing music outdoors with my favorite people. I mourn for my mother and I celebrate my bandmates' transition into motherhood in one great swell of the heart. Its gonna be loud.
You are cordially invited to come and bear witness.
Admission to the music festival is free and open to the public. The art fair requires admission fees. FLOWN takes the stage on Sunday May 11th at 1pm.
Click here for directions.
Click here for a complete line-up and list of set times.
Click here for information about Frieze Art Fair and admission fees.
Click here to read some recent press about FLOWN.
Monday, April 28, 2014
We all gathered wood for the fire. Each of us found and imprinted a special stick with an intention for release and an intention for calling in. We used watercolors, charcoal, lipstick, and ballpoint pens to mark these intentions with sigils on opposite ends of our particular pieces of wood. Each one was different and beautiful.
After dinner we sang the chorus of The Mermaid over and over, ramshackle and piecemeal as we clamored down the sandy stairs to the beach, sigiled sticks in hand. Gonzalo and Juan built the fire out of driftwood and set benches around it so that we all faced the ocean and the fire at once, cliffs on either side and the Casa behind us. The full moon glowed silver above and the fire burned gold below. The ocean was black and inky and felt like the sum of all things.
Everyone stood and cast their sigils into the fire, some silent, some shouting, all grateful, all beautiful. Gonzalo went last, riding his piece of driftwood like a broomstick and shouting ABRACADABRA as he threw it into the flames.
The driftwood burned hot and fast and sparks and sand danced around us as we sang songs from childhood in rounds, the wind carrying our voices out to sea.
As goodbyes were said, the little clay pots that we got in town were produced one by one and filled with the white sandy ashes settling around the edges of the dying embers - our intentions alchemized, released and transformed, to be carried forth into the world and used in the ignition of future fires.
Well the ocean waves may roll
And the stormy winds may blow
We poor sailors go skipping o'er the top
While the landlubbers lie down below below below
While the landlubbers lie down below
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