Colin Self

CAT# RVNGNL94
Release date: February 21, 2025

On respite ∞ levity for the nameless ghost in crisis, Colin Self travels from one realm to another, conjuring uncanny voices through a song of their own. Material and immaterial, fixities and fluidities, bodies and souls: such distinctions matter little in the looping, eternally intersecting world of r∞L4nGc, where radiant, limitless beauty and boundless, inescapable terror can be one and the same.

r∞L4nGc, the Berlin and New York-based artist’s third album, is a greeting after years of conscious exile. To complete the work, Self shed the comfortable familiarities of collaboration, at least with others on this plane, instead devoting themselves to those quieter, physically-departed voices that sought to speak through them in the night. To help deliver those nameless spirits a voice of their own, Self turned towards singing in Latin and Polari, a form of canting, slantwise English first used more than 500 years ago for underworld and queer forces to find selective intelligibility while under arrest, to better communicate with whichever restive spirits might hear them. It’s a solitude in service of deeper connection, and as they sing on “Losing Faith”: “I lost everything but kept on moving/Kept on breathing through/a memory of you.”

The period since Self’s 2018 full-length Siblings and the EP follow-up Orphans a year later brought profound shifts to the artist’s life. The gutting toll of death, from countless friends and other beloved passing, to inconceivable global loss, forced the artist to retreat inwards, learning to inhabit a darkness that they’d long shied away from. Cultivating a meditation practice that often led them to working through the night, and singing in languages that shimmer but might not automatically scan to our ears, was for Self a way of honoring these absent beings, as much an audience for their work as any who reside on this plane.

“People around me might not know what those words mean, but all of these trans or queer ghosts that are listening to the music or watching the performance are having a really good time,” Self says. “These songs sound gorgeous, but they’re all about police, eating ass, and sex work, these profane things. I wanted to find a way to breathe life into this act of hiding the explicit in the quotidian-sounding atmosphere of pop music.”

In an essay on Greer Lankton and the double use of the word “doll” (referring simultaneously to Lankton’s primary medium, and the trans women who self-identify as such), scholar McKenzie Wark argues, “Lankton’s dolls are never beautiful, in that beauty implies an approximation to an ideal form. But they can be pretty, in the way they are adorned with garments, jewels, and styling.” Within the image of Lankton’s uncanny, misshapen bodies, which model a certain kind of trans sublimity, Wark finds work that tugs at extremes, refusing the comfort of familiar form. The same could be said for Self, whose return to puppetry coincided with the making of r∞L4nGc; music that channels the departed spirits of elders like Lankton, conjuring jagged edges that may rend enough space for slivers of grace to slip in behind.

Followers of Self’s work will still find familiar sonic forms on r∞L4nGc, from galvanizing electronic experimentations to Self’s lofty, soaring voice, undiminished after years of relative silence. “Busy Walks Into the Memory Palace” is ass-throwing dance music for corporeal forms that don’t yet exist, making Self a different kind of time traveler, the track primed to be played thousands of years hence. On “Dissumlato,” it sounds as if Self has been sealed into a wayward spacecraft, a synthesizer and their voice their only company, performing for themselves and whomever else in the beyond might be listening to them.

Attending to more earthly concerns, and the fraying queer communities that Self has nourished for many years, “gajo” deploys a 2-step beat, interweaving chamber orchestral maneuvers and electronic vocal modulation. As they sing, “Something calling out to me from the other side/It’s my own choice to make within this life,” you hear Self contemplate the ecstatic terror of reaching into the unknown in one another, no space to shapeshift without letting down the barriers separating ourselves from one another in the first place.

“∞,” the album’s closing track, a near 11-minute suite (also released as lemniscate, a four-track EP to introduce Colin’s new music), is central to the album’s thematic core. The lemniscate, the formal name for the mathematical sign most of us know as the infinity symbol, has guided Self backwards and forwards through the endless quest to carry meaning from one realm to another. It’s a looping journey that requires immense humility and a willingness to shed the stability of the bounded self, instead opening to voices that cry out from a darkened corner, still too vulnerable to emerge in daylight.

“The lemniscate begins with a prayer and darkness being pulled into a portal in which I have to sort of face death, or face loss and grief and sadness, to then kind of come out on the other side with some clarity,” Self says. “Instead of thinking of the darkness being this place of fear, it’s often in the shadows where the important things are happening. We can’t know [these spirits], or we can’t see them, but we have to believe that they exist.”

Many spirits present themselves on the album, and while Self’s rapturous singing ability is the medium for these transmissions, listen closely and you might meet someone you never knew existed.

Colin Self’s respite ∞ levity for the nameless ghost in crisis will be released on vinyl, Japanese import CD, and digital editions on February 21, 2025. On behalf of Colin and RVNG Intl., a portion of the proceeds from this release will benefit Palestine Children’s Relief Fund, an organization that provides free medical care to thousands of injured and ill children yearly who lack access to care within the local health care system.