Sockpuppet: Blog tag:sockpuppet.band,2026-05-14:blog 2025-03-31T00:00:00+00:00 Transgender Day of Visibility 2025-03-31T00:00:00+00:00 2025-03-31T00:00:00+00:00 urn:uuid:927454a8-2aa6-5bc7-9a8a-bc2a167b9c2d fluffy Today is Transgender Day of Visibility, and as a transgender musician who has been releasing music online since the 1990s (and writing music since the 1980s), it’s super important to me that members of my community get seen today. The complex feelings around being transgender have always been a big part of my music, even before I had the words to express it.

]]> Today is Transgender Day of Visibility, and as a transgender musician who has been releasing music online since the 1990s (and writing music since the 1980s), it’s super important to me that members of my community get seen today. The complex feelings around being transgender have always been a big part of my music, even before I had the words to express it.

My album Transitions (and its companion Deadnames) are perhaps the most obviously on-the-nose trans-related albums of mine, but it’s woven into the DNA of so much of my music. The songs All Tan, Adding Up to Nothing, Hypnagogic, Material Change, and Fool in the Middle are all quite specifically about gender feels, but being trans has informed everything about my life and my existence.

Here are some other lesser-known trans musicians of note (in no particular order):

  • Bedussey, self-described as “bedroom pop-punk”
  • elizabeth veldon, a noise/drone artist
  • ella guro makes ridiculously awesome abstract chiptune soundscapes
  • Jennifer Vena Wood goes more for affirmational acoustic folksy stuff which feels super underrepresented in trans music these days and I’m 100% here for it
  • Kookie sings a bunch of songs about being trans, and about being a Linux user, two things which are super entwined in my experience
  • Left at London does a super interesting fusion of classic and modern forms
  • Patricia Taxxon does incredible weird experimental music
  • Ratwyfe makes fun songs about all sorts of things; definitely check out cryptid (mothman) which is super relatable
  • Trust Fund Ozu makes some amazingly lush musical textures in what feels like an amazing balance between rock and hyperpop

There are of course many, many more out there; I put out a call for recommendations and was absolutely overwhelmed by the number of trans artists I was pointed to! It was super difficult to pick just a few to showcase here, and it would be a disservice to let them go without further mention. Thank you so much to everyone who shared their own picks.

Also, please check out the Seattle Trans and Nonbinary Choral Ensemble, a choir I am extremely proud to be a part of.

]]> A new ambient experiment fixation 2025-01-29T01:46:16-08:00 2025-01-29T01:46:16-08:00 urn:uuid:531bc817-230d-5ba7-9ed4-0e052eae4722 fluffy Convolution reverbs are pretty neat. Basically you take a recording of a space’s acoustics and then the reverb characteristics of that space can then be applied to any audio signal. I usually use convolution reverbs for most of my music, since it’s a lot easier for me to use someone’s recorded impulse response of, say, the Ulm chapel than to fly to Germany to record there in person.

]]> Convolution reverbs are pretty neat. Basically you take a recording of a space’s acoustics and then the reverb characteristics of that space can then be applied to any audio signal. I usually use convolution reverbs for most of my music, since it’s a lot easier for me to use someone’s recorded impulse response of, say, the Ulm chapel than to fly to Germany to record there in person.

You can also use recordings of things other than acoustic spaces for interesting effects; Logic’s Space Designer comes with a whole bunch of impulse responses that are used for various effects, including drum transformers, ghost rhythms, and other such things. A lot of my more sound designy stuff makes heavy use of this.

But what if you use whole songs as an impulse response?

Here’s some results I got while messing around with it just now:

The way I did these in logic:

ir-project-layout.pngir-space-designer.png
  1. Create an audio track with the source audio
  2. Add a Space Designer plugin, and drag the convolution audio onto it
  3. Set the “dry” level to Mute, and the “wet” level to 0
  4. Create an empty instrument track, and make an empty region that’s roughly the length of the convolution audio that starts at the end of your source audio (to give it a proper reverb tail)
  5. Apply the Mastering Assistant
  6. Bounce!

This seems like a really good framework for experimentation, especially for drone tones and ambient soundscapes. I’d be super interested to see what other people come up with!

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