11/12/2024

Colin Self Announces respite ∞ levity for the nameless ghost in crisis

Put on respite ∞ levity for the nameless ghost in crisis in darkness and prepare to find yourself amongst unfamiliar companions. Colin Self travels to and from one realm to another on r∞L4nGc, the Berlin and New York-based artist’s third album, conjuring uncanny voices through their own singular singing style. Material and immaterial, fixities and fluidities, bodies and souls: such distinctions matter little in the looping, ever-crossing world of r∞L4nGc, where radiant, limitless beauty and boundless, inescapable terror are one and the same.

Incorporating Self’s long standing practice of dollmaking, and drawing upon a conscious exile that allowed the artist to settle into conversation with lost souls on other planes of existence, r∞L4nGc is an integrated vision of the artist’s eclectic practice. Singing in Polari, a forgotten form of slantwise English used by queer subcultures for centuries to evade detection, Self performs for our departed teachers and friends, and for the rest of us, ready to commune with uncanny spirits. There’s a beauty to Self’s voice that is inescapable, a shining sun cutting across uncertain emotions.

Yet on “respite for the tulpamancer,” Self is unafraid to let a ghostly chill pass through the familiar magic they conjure vocally, aware that true insight often occurs in the shadows, where doubt finds a body. Invoking the idea of the tulpamancer, a Buddhist notion of someone capable of giving form to a spectral, sentient force with a will of its own, Self sets the tone for r∞L4nGc: be prepared to hear from plenty of others finding their own way into this world, with Self serving as a collaborator to myriad ghostly figures.

Self and collaborator Bobbi Salvör Menuez created a video for “respite for the tulpamancer,” filmed in Vevey and the mountain of Le Moléson, Switzerland. Find that just below, alongside everything else you need to know about r∞L4nGc.