KOLEŻANKA’S ALONE WITH THE SOUND THE MIND MAKES OUT TOMORROW | SHARES “CITY SUMMER SWEAT” VIDEO
BAR/NONE RECORDS
koleżanka, the project of multi-instrumentalist Kristina Moore (she/they), will release their sophomore album Alone with the Sound the Mind Makes this Friday, but today they’re sharing a video for standout track “City Summer Sweat.” The final single off of their new LP wrestles with perception, understanding, or, more aptly, misunderstanding and the ways that bodies and gender identity are appraised through a narrow lens dictated by archaic, yet prevalent, societal concepts. Speaking to “City Summer Sweat!”, Moore writes:
“This song was inspired by a conversation I had with a friend late one summer night on a fire escape regarding Jacques Derrida’s “différance” and how much, or little, is conveyed through language. I thought it might be fun to call and respond between English and Polish, considering.
Similarly to sign vs signer, the song is about the way a body and a person is perceived by self vs others. In the summer I feel most vulnerable to this perception, as the exposed physicality of my body suggests a kind of femininity I wish not to convey. I feel like gender and generally the relatability between all beings with bodies having to be perceived by others can operate similarly in that their conveyance can only be derived by deference – I am B because I am not A, and any intricacies of self-perception are reduced or misconstrued in other’s perceiving.
Instrumentally, this song was entirely an accident. I was under a spell of hyper-productivity, writing songs every day just to see what would happen. I was feeling flustered about a song i had been working on for weeks, so I turned on the omnichord and make what felt like a parody of a song to try to take myself less seriously. I was actively trying to stretch myself in my vocal work, and thought it would be so fun for the end to feel theatrical and exaggerated.”
koleżanka released their debut LP, Place Is, for Bar/None in July of 2021 to accolades from AllMusic, KEXP, Bandcamp, Stereogum, Paste Magazine and more. Their last single “Canals of our City” picked up where Place Is left off, with layers of otherworldly vocals soaring over Stereolab-indebted grooves that sprawl out, shimmering like an inferior mirage. “Canals of the City” sees koleżanka sorting through tragedy, recalling an intense loss that shaped their relationship with their teenage love and the weight of that experience. Moore goes acutely autobiographical, describing this traumatic experience in detail. While Moore works through the tragedy that occurred that summer, the chorus of celestial vocals rises into one final crescendo, carrying the weight of that love, that memory, and that future that never was. Their next single, “Slapstick”, is written from the perspective of a lifelong service worker, which Moore knows all too well. Moore writes about the banal struggle of working for tips, contorting yourself for patrons who are, at the worst of times, openly hostile and at the best of times a fleeting distraction from subsistence living. The subtext here, of course, is of the consistent degradation of the working class in work arbitrarily deemed as unskilled labor. To this feeling of being set up for failure and the inability to escape the mundanely vicious cycle, Moore sings “getting tired of my late night tricks / disassociate into a drink or two / it is hard to be kind to yourself in a world that isn’t kind to you.”
Moore, having been busy with their work in Foyer Red, returns to koleżanka with a refined sense of purpose. Throwing themself into the proverbial meat grinder to extract songs from their past, present, and future that are brutally honest and stunningly orchestrated. Alone with the Sound the Mind Makes is out February 17th on Bar/None and was recorded at Pulp Arts in Gainesville, FL. The album was engineered by Danny Clifton and Lily Ruckstuhl and mixed & mastered by Jonathan Schenke at Studio Windows in Brooklyn, NY. Kristina Moore and Ark Calkins produced the album.
In the last few years, we’ve all gotten a bit more acquainted with isolation at some point or another. It was no different for Kristina Moore (she/they), the songwriter behind koleżanka. During the long, dire winter months of late 2020 and early 2021, Moore found themselves holed up in their Brooklyn apartment, spending most of their time alone, and thus tumbling deeper into their own mind. The noise of daily life in New York City, and the numbness it can produce, receded. Moore’s thoughts were alight with memories, dreams, musical explorations. New songs began to pour out of them.
What could’ve been another despondent lockdown instead turned into the genesis for koleżanka’s sophomore album, Alone With The Sound The Mind Makes. Unable to work and without the distractions of social life, Moore kept a strict schedule, plotting their days down to what sort of meals they were going to make, which songs to revisit. It was a way of enforcing order on a chaotic time, during which they wrestled with mental health swings many of us are familiar with from quarantine (or otherwise) — depression, then anxiety, manic bouts of productivity with undercurrents of exhaustion. Without the resources for therapy, Moore had to learn to navigate it solo, to “make friends” with various unsettled states. In the process, they wrote an album that dives deep into a person’s reckoning with their self, their body, their experiences, their perceptions.
As Moore developed this new batch of songs, they traded ideas back and forth with regular koleżanka collaborator Ark Calkins, who helped flesh out new layers and directions. Then, Moore decamped to Florida with producer Jonathan Schenke, who helped them achieve a fuller, lusher vision of what koleżanka could be.
It had been a dynamic time leading up to the album. After years recording under various monikers, from their youth back in Phoenix to their adulthood in New York, Moore released a few early projects as koleżanka before making their official debut with 2021’s Place Is. In the interim, they joined ascendant art-punk group Foyer Red. Moore characterizes it as an era of discovery, from “getting a foothold” with Place Is to crediting the adventurousness of Foyer Red with opening up their own writing for koleżanka.
Fittingly for an album concerned with the internal workings of our thoughts and emotions, Moore let themselves wander when writing Alone With The Sound The Mind Makes, following stream of consciousness wherever it led. While Place Is had the occasional psychedelic turn, its successor is vibrant, overflowing. These are dreamscapes punctuated by concrete images, aqueous guitars and vaporous synths and swooping, soaring, unpredictable vocal melodies all carrying stories that flit from the banalities of working a service job (“Slapstick”) to apocalypse dreams (“A River Rushing”). It sounds exactly how wading through memory feels.
Alone With The Sound The Mind Makes thrives on these juxtapositions. In a single song, “Canals Of Our City” places young love and debauchery against a life-altering cataclysm; “A Body” and “City Summer Sweat” mull over our physical forms and how we are unable to control people’s perceptions of them, before “Saddle Up, Cowboy” references the way late capitalistic structures suffocates those same bodies. “Each breath comes as a sigh these days,” Moore sings in the latter, in a way summing up the album’s headspace. Whether in piecing through warm recollections (“Koszmary”), or grappling with cycles of trauma (“Cheers”), Alone With The Sound The Mind Makes is an album with an intense emotional arc, a sort of psychological journey through one day, or through multiple decades at once. “I wanted the record to feel like you were leaving your house, and wandering, and all the places you mind goes,” Moore explains.
The destination of that journey is, in a sense, where it all began. It’s no mistake that Alone With The Sound The Mind Makes opens and closes with visions of home. First, in “Koszmary,” it’s a childhood scene of running from dust storms, and an innocent experience of oblivion when those storms inevitably caught up. After all the stops the album makes on its way, it closes with “A River Rushing,” inspired by a dream in which Moore saw themselves at their old family house in rural Arizona, surrounded by past and future versions of themselves, and everyone they knew, as the world ended. The album is carried away with burning mountains, biblical floods, and warped currents of guitar.
But for all the ways Alone With The Sound The Mind Makes ventures out into psychological seas, it’s the process of someone centering themselves, finding more of an acceptance — even, or particularly, with a conclusion that revolves around death and all of us eventually being forgotten. “There has to be something beautiful about the impermanence of life,” Moore says. “I try to accept it. It makes it feel so much more important to be present with things.” There, in a dream about the end of things, all the questions Moore has turned over across the album conclude with a strange sort of peace, a self-realization amidst one maelstrom after another. And, in turn, Alone With The Sound The Mind Makes sounds like the realization of koleżanka, an album both visceral and transporting, woven from strands plucked from the ether and made, if only for a moment, tangible.
koleżanka
Alone With The Sound The Mind Makes
(Bar/None Records)
Release Date: February 17, 2023
Artist Links
Photo Credit: Mateo Ruiz Gonazlez
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