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.

This performance took place in VRChat, and was hosted by Corbelle’s Music Fesivals.

I will be performing up to two songs (time permitting!) at the Trans Academy’s “Moonlit” concert series. Join TRANS.7885 for access, or watch on the Twitch stream.

I will be performing a song or two at the Trans Academy’s “Moonlit” concert series. Join TRANS.7885 for access, or watch on the Twitch stream.

To that end, I have a new album out, which you might be interested in if you’re seeing this post.

Other than that, there’s what I’ll be buying today:

• The entire discography of Vulthra
• I’ll be doing catchup on err:Rawr’s discography
• And the entire discography of Balance Lost, a Song Fight!er of note

Sharing is caring!

Unfortunately, as things stand, bluesky is really just not a great substitute for a proper feed reader, so I’d suggest getting one of those instead rather than trying to have a single social feed be your one view to the universe.

(Following my actual bluesky profile probably is a better experience overall, anyway.)

Music done for Strawberry Jam 9 and a couple other things.

More info

• Track: Time’s Running Out
• Track: Chilling
• Track: Die, Walküre, Die
• Track: Kairo
• Track: Worrying
• Track: Wandering
• Track: The Advice
• Track: Pull Yourself Together
• Track: Spycraft
• Track: Gone Fishin'
• Track: Rossini Al Dente
• Track: Sex in the Closet
• Track: Sexy Funtimes
• Track: Rumination
• Track: Synthcraft
• Track: Armored Combat
• Track: Women Fear Me, Fish Love Me
• Track: Fishing Is My Cardio
• Track: Diegetic Potato
• Track: A Night on the Town

I will be performing two songs at the Trans Academy’s “Moonlit” concert series. Join TRANS.7885 for access, or watch on the Twitch stream.

Set list:

• 120 MPH
• Safety In Numbers

I will be once again performing at the Trans Academy’s “Moonlit” concert series, this time for the European time slot. Join TRANS.7885 for access, or watch on the Twitch stream.

I will be performing a song or two, depending on avalable time.

Scheduled time is approximate and subject to change.

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:

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!

I will be performing two songs at the Trans Academy’s “Moonlit” concert series. Join TRANS.7885 for access, or watch on the Twitch stream.

Tentative set list:

• Fool in the Middle
• Paper Cuts

• The We ♥ Katamari soundtrack; specifically I have an old gamerip that unfortunately has the full per-level runtime tracks which get kind of old after a while, but it was surprisingly fun to listen to while driving for some errands
• Psychic Realty (Revisited): An amazing remix album of one of Jeremy Blake’s already-amazing albums
• … and that’s it, that’s everything I listened to this week

Sometimes I just gotta give my ears a break, I guess.

I will be performing two songs at the Trans Academy’s “Moonlit” concert series. Join TRANS.7885 for access, or watch on the Twitch stream.

Set list:

• Better Than Before
• Comandante C40 with some special mashup fun :)

• Benny Benassi - Electroman: I bought this because “Good Girl” was on Lumines Electric Symphony for the PS Vita, pretty much the only game that I spent any significant amount of time playing on that doomed system. The album as a whole seems like it’s a lighthearted parody/homage of all of the dance music styles that were popular in 2011. Or at least I found a lot of humor in it.
• Disappear by Revengeday
• The Rainbow Disconnection by Sad Kermit: I absolutely cannot believe that this album is allowed to continue to exist. I could have sworn it was DMCAed at one point. Also back when I got it, it was a free download from the artist’s website, I think. There’s more tracks that have been added since my acquisition.
• The Weekend EP by This Mess is Mine
• A Certain Distance by Lusine: some amazingly lush electronica that makes my ears very happy

Also, I’ve gone ahead and enabled webmention on this site in lieu of comments. The layout is just the defaults from webmention.js. Someday I’ll get around to building a proper comment system instead.

I will be once again performing the song Everybody Calm Down at the Trans Academy’s “Moonlit” concert series, this time for the North America time slot. Join TRANS.7885 for access, or watch on the Twitch stream.

This will be the last time I can perform at Trans Academy Moonlit NA for a while.

• Recreational Love by The Bird and the Bee: Not Bird and the Bee’s best album, but also not their worst. And even their worst album is still pretty darn good!
• The Caribbean: I seem to have gotten some of their music from the various SXSW Emerging Artists collections and it’s all pretty good. Guess I’m going to have to add some of their albums to my wishlist. Conveniently enough they have a discography purchase option, as all Bandcamp musicians should.
• Hotel Valentine by Cibo Matto: I used to be super into Cibo Matto in the late 90s. Viva! La Woman and Stereo Type A were both amazing, genre-defining experiences for me, and I saw them perform live in 1999 which was super amazing. So when Hotel Valentine came out, I bought it immediately, and then proceeded to not get around to listening to it until just now. It’s pretty okay, I guess.
• Warp20 (Chosen): As far as best-of collections of the state of electronic music in 2009 go, this one is super great.

Also, I want to ramble a little bit about the Last.fm yearly wrapup. It’s cool that it tells me my top listens in terms of artists and albums, but it’s a bit annoying that it doesn’t do anything to normalize albums based on their track count. Like, yes, I listened to all 100 tracks from Song Fight!’s A Grand Parade but that doesn’t mean I listened to it 100 times. There’s just 100 scrobbles from it due to my single listen of it.

I wish I could get counts of just albums, not individual tracks, so that I could better figure out which artists I listened to.

I definitely listened to a lot of Green Day, ambienteer, Benn Jordan (particularly the stuff he put in his massive Gumroad drop), and Jeremy Blake. But that’s also because those are artists I happen to own a lot of music of.

For much of the year I didn’t have AudioScrobbler running or forgot to sync play stats from my phone before they got lost forever (although now that I use PlexAmp as my primary mobile player that shouldn’t be a concern going forward), but I also know that I didn’t listen to music for much of it because I was so busy making it. For me, music has historically been what I listen to while working on other things, but since I’m basically full-time as a musician now, that doesn’t leave me a lot of time to listen to stuff, and after a day of working in the studio the last thing my ears need is to keep the fatigue going. So as of late I mostly just listen to music when I’m driving, and I don’t do a lot of that either.

It’s also a shame that the amazing music I heard on the now-departed Radio Free Fedi didn’t make it into AudioScrobbler either. There were some absolute bangers there. RFF was also a great place to get discovered in general. I hope more projects like it emerge and find a more sustainable path forward.

But in the meantime, sharing music discoveries is a big part of why I blog about what I listen to.

I will be performing the song Everybody Calm Down at the Trans Academy’s “Moonlit” concert series. Join TRANS.7885 for access, or watch on the Twitch stream.

We’re back with one of VRChat’s biggest events throughout the year, and the Furry Hideout’s most important piece of yearly media Dec 29-31!

The regular Furry Hideout will have a portal to the event space, and we hope to see you and your friends in the group instances in VRChat.… pic.twitter.com/GKkwYYa1nx

— Furryhideout (@furryhideout) December 26, 2024