#DEEPCUTS

#002 AUG 12, 2024

#DEEPCUTS

While this post was sure to be called #deepcuts, I was initially only going to include a few work process photos. I wanted to share the excitement of what’s beneath the surface. Like passing around black books catching notes and riffs on pages that never made the final cut and were perhaps never meant to.

Between catching up on Osunlade mixes in the studio and missing California sunsets at the ocean, my synesthesia has been feeling like the colors of bass and machetes cutting through water without making a ripple. Which for the past (somethin somethin) years I’ve been envisioning and creating ways to draw the sound of histories in space and memory.

Getting into these dimensions of the deepcut for me comes with the practice of revisiting past moments and remixing them in the present. Primarily, past moments of creating work or music (that I most definitely will never publicly share) and times outdoors where wordless conversation have been archived like a palimpsest. Although you may not [initially] be able to *read* the first layers, they are always present. Forming the foundation of the top layer - the things we easily see and hear.

Seeing through the layers/ veils calls out to the past opening a path for a response like magma cracking open the earth, pushing up crystalline ancestors that have cured in the shadows. What happens when the call and response meet is for another post…

And while there’s the assumption that this practice is neat and packaged in sunshine, revisiting can sometimes flood your pillows and make it snow in April…

Nonetheless, the 90-plus-degree heat of my studio recently created many of these deepcuts on works in progress. Like crackle paste -which I mostly hate - type cuts. My first thought was how I was going to seal them up or even cut whole parts off the panel (because I [mostly] hate crackle that much). Knowing damn well the attempts to “fix” it would mark it for the incomplete pile.

However, the charge on the first layer is the energy of lightning in a red akin to blood. Both lightning and blood carry currents and codices beyond the measure of our own lifespans and probably this earth…

There is no way to hold back currents like these so it’s no surprise they split open. In the studio, I’ve come to respect the cuts. It’s these “happy accidents” that are invigorating necessities for life and creating.

For me facing why “fixing” the crackle was viewed as a remedy became a reminder on the futility of one's audacity to even try to cover up that which one always is...

As I’m writing this, new 35mm scans are now here in my inbox. Photos from decades ago that my great aunt - the now matriarch of our family -asked me to develop. Her mother- my great-grandmother - is smiling to the camera in a few of the photos.

Telling me to remember. To revere these reveals. These re-visitings. To never hide.

⚓︎