To Build Beyond

Allie: Thinking about this word “expansive” that you just used, I’m curious if there was a visual or a space that you had in mind when you were crafting this track, or if there’s one that comes to mind when you listen now.

Jared: It’s so interesting because you sent me a poem [“The Universe: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack” by Tracy K. Smith] that one of your coworkers said that the piece reminded them of, which I thought was super cool, and then a friend who I collaborate with and who helped me produce the piece, Regina Martinez, said that it reminded her of the deep sea. I didn’t think about that as I was making it, but I’ve been listening back and am really in love with what I made. I do get this aquatic, unknown, large body of water feel. That’s different for me, because oftentimes people will tell me that a lot of things that I make sonically feel very airy and atmospheric. I don’t even know if that’s supposed to suggest that my temperament is changing.

I think “GIRLY*** WORLD” is supposed to be a preface to music that I’m working on and have been working on with other producers, and girly*** is the alias that I’m using: either all caps or all lowercase with three asterisks, which are always supposed to be citations. There wasn’t a visual that I had in mind, but I think some of the sounds in it, like the tuning, are quite literally the tuning of girly*** and trying to find the girly*** sound that I’m looking for and crafting.

Allie: I love this idea of finding the sound or searching for what girly*** is, and I’m curious what the breakdown is between choreography and improvisation. When you produce a track like this one, how much of it is predetermined or planned out, and how much is being navigated in real time?

Jared: I really appreciate this question. The breakdown of choreography and improvisation… I really like that. I live on the South Side in Hyde Park, and I can see all the way downtown. I can make a mental note that I’m gonna go downtown, but the way that I can see straight downtown, that’s not going to be the way that I get there, because some streets are one way, some are obstructed by the river and lake and all these different things. An artist peer and friend of mine, Shir [Ende], does a lot of work with choreography, and she said to me that architecture is like choreography for people’s bodies. I didn’t realize how much I think about sounds in a drafting kind of way, too.

For this piece, I was thinking about a draft in this cathartic way. I knew that I didn’t want the piece to start or end at the same place. I wanted it to keep opening up and maybe there’s a throughline or maybe not. The tuning is a bit of a throughline, and some of the bass that gets subdued is a throughline, but the form starts as a skeleton, and then I build on that. The improvisation comes in with how I apply samples, having this multichannel setup where all of these things are running into a mixer and I’m recording it all: I’m recording a synth and I’m recording a Roland sampler, and then I’m also doing things in Ableton. That is where the improvisation or the play comes in and things become less planned, even though I knew for this specific piece, roughly three to five minutes was what was posed to me. I knew I would pick the latter and do five because I’m so used to longer, time-based things by way of doing stuff in the club and scores and radio. It was actually a challenge to work in five minutes, but I think I needed it. I’m working on music now, and sometimes when I’m working with a producer, they want to make a three minute track and that stresses me out. I love loops, and if we find loops together I could let those play out for so long. This notion of completion or things being finished is something that I really struggle with.

This feels like a preface to actual music, because I think the girly*** music I want to make is tracks that are buried in emotion and context. I want to make songs that are sexy. I want to make songs that people want to play in their car. I want to make songs that people dance to. I want to make songs that people play when they feel like they’re that bitch or songs that people play when they feel like they’re contemplating if they’re in love with someone. I don’t know if “GIRLY*** WORLD” gives you explicitly any of those things but I feel like the possibility is there in this piece.

Allie: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense and goes back to how you started this conversation, thinking about limitations and how a limitation can be really generative. I was thinking about duration and pacing because most of the work that you’re doing is generally much longer, and you can really get lost in the full set or the radio show, so to limit yourself to only three to five minutes I’m sure can feel very different.

I was trying to put some names to it earlier, and I feel like it begins with this searching on the radio channel, and then it moves into a more atmospheric space or quietude, and then we move into a dance space or this percussive ecstasy, and then it ends on this really special moment that feels like a whisper or a secret poem, and then the tune out with the bookends of the radio at the beginning and the end.

Jared: The tuning is to highlight ties to my radio practice. It was also conceptually to play with this idea of fine-tuning girly*** as an alias and as a musical project, and finding the girly*** sound and just thinking about that physicality of it. Maybe most cars now don’t have a dial, but I just really love that feel. I’ve also been thinking about this idea of how we would share information if we were to lose the internet and about how radio at one point was that vessel. People got news and entertainment from the radio, so I wanted to insert these little bits.

These arcs, that’s what all of these things make me think about: there’s drama, and maybe a bit of a story there, and a catharsis. You start someplace and maybe you’re introduced to something, and then the story unfolds and there’s a climax, and there’s a resolution. The piece ends with this declaration of, “It’s a girly world, it’s a girly sound, it’s a girly show.” I wanted a girly*** sound to be a mantra, as clear as possible, while also manipulating it. I wanted it to be declarative, because girly***, and why I chose that alias, feel like a reclamation for me. I don’t want to get to like, my life was so traumatic or anything like that, because it’s not necessarily that, but I think when I really needed gender to work for me as a young person it just didn’t. I was misgendered for a pretty substantial amount of my life, and that creates a type of dissonance and chaos. At one point people were mistaking me to be a girl, or people would ask me, “Are you a boy or a girl?” if it was a hot summer day before I needed a glass of water. “Are you a boy or a girl?”

Choosing to identify as girly*** and girly also doesn’t feel monolithic. Ending the piece on “It’s a girly world. It’s a girly sound. It’s a girly show,” feels like a moment of justice for me and anybody that can identify with it on any level. We’re not talking about genitalia or how one presents, but that sort of catalyst for chaos in your own body and your voice doing that. People would say, “Oh, you sound like a girl,” so I just really wanted the piece to end that way in this confident space. Maybe it’s confrontational, but it’s still hopeful and playful, as well.

For me, with dancing and working within nightlife, that is what it is. Sometimes people associate the club and nightlife with drugs, but I think rhythms can create this ecstasy and rhythmic thing, and I wanted to touch on that. I had multiple versions of this piece, so I have parts where it’s almost all percussive, and I thought, that’s not what this should be for this outlet. Then I have parts where there wasn’t a percussive moment, and that didn’t feel very honest, as well. I felt like I was not accounting for a part of myself. So this version for New Suns feels like a very balanced mesh of all of these parts of what girly*** is and where I am as a sound artist. I still have qualms with “musician.” I don’t fully feel like I’ve come into my own as a musician just yet. I think I’m on the brink of it. That’s what a girly*** world is.

Allie: When did the alias of girly*** begin? And as somebody who both lives in and grew up in Chicago, what is it like to be in the nightlife spaces that you’re talking about now? Do you feel like you’ve had a consistent community through the years, or has there been so much change that it feels like a different place? I’m curious to hear a little bit about your Chicago roots.

Jared: I think the weird thing about girly*** is that it was with me even when I was trying not to account for girly*** and it almost starts as a childhood wound. It was the thing that I was trying to change or alter the most because the chaos that it created when embodied through me made me so uncomfortable, because it made so many other people uncomfortable.

I had different iterations where girly*** was trying to come through and I was still trying to subdue it, because I was trying to survive and get through high school. There was a period, maybe 2018, where I just changed my Twitter handle. I would always change it, and it was kind of troll-y, but then it stuck and I started adding three asterisks to it.

I was in residence at the Hyde Park Art Center, and I was writing it everywhere, and that has ties to, again, high school. I was friends with a lot of graffiti writers. That’s even how I got into photography, because a lot of them were like, “Take pictures of my tag!” I started just having this mania where I was writing girly*** on so many things. That was 2017 or 2018, but I wasn’t public with it. It was some fantasy, or maybe I was still internally rendering it and tending to the wounded aspect of girly***, but now, I think, girly*** has transformed from being a wounded soldier to a healing agent for me, if that makes sense.

Chicago is an epicenter for music, and so many genres as we know and love them have come to Chicago and become radicalized, once coming to Chicago and then going back out. So thinking about jazz, thinking about gospel, thinking about R&B, and then obviously house music. Detroit is like our sister in a lot of ways, or like our cousin, some of us would say, which is also Midwest techno and house.

In Chicago, a lot of things didn’t feel available to me as a young person. We’re even still seeing parallels of that now where it feels like being a young person congregating in spaces is being criminalized here, so it’s harder and more complicated to get stuff off as a young person, because you need to be twenty-one and doing it in a bar, doing it in a space that’s already sanctioned, which feels really wrong and antithetical to expanding or moving or worldbuilding.

I moved away to go to Baltimore, so I never got to have my adult indoctrination here. As a teen I was going raves and what the kids now are calling “indie sleaze.” I was a teenager going to warehouse parties in Wicker Park, and that culture is no longer a thing. When I came back to Chicago as an adult, having some performance and DJing and public output under my belt, getting booked at these clubs that are historical institutions, like Smart Bar, was huge for me. Places like Berlin, which are no longer here, and having my first residency at this place called Danny’s, which closed during Covid — I only got to have one party. It felt really generative and inspiring for me, especially because I come from a family that has connections or deep relationship to nightlife. My mom used to go to The Warehouse as a teenager, and she has all these wild stories about Frankie Knuckles and not drinking the punch at The Warehouse and lying to my grandmother about where she was. So when I came back and was like, “Oh, I’m DJing at Berlin or Smart Bar,” she was like, “Oh, my God! That’s so cool! You’re DJing on a Thursday at Smart Bar, that was the night that me and my friends used to go.”

It’s full circle and really special, but it worries me now, because the city is changing so much, and Covid really forced our hand at how to reimagine what community is. It definitely forced me to really assess how much I was misconstruing community and network, or conflating the two. Chicago is also where I have learned how to be a really active, accountable community member, and I’m so thankful for that. I think the city is going through a major change right now, and I can’t quite fully put my hand on how much space communities that I occupy will have, and that’s a little scary. But I do have faith in some of the people that have been spearheading it, even before I got back to the city. They’re well organized and are willing to put everything on the line to pay people and get people to safety and housing. Even with the internet, I feel like we’re all just passing around the same $250 for mutual aid because our government right now isn’t holding us down. It’s sad, but at the same time, I’ve never been more grateful to be a part of a queer nightlife community or artist communities where people are really doing everything that they can with limitations, doing such incredible work or taking incredible initiative to do the best that they can and look out for people. Being in this country right now, specifically cities — that’s what I can speak to — it’s just hard. It’s not easy. It’s not getting any easier.