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Various Artists - Track Pack Volume I

Hole Vision with Sodomahigomorra and Crystal Peñalosa

Spirit Time with Rat Porridge and Mercury Symbol

Black Meteoric Star's original soundtrack for the film "No More White Presidents" unofficial cat# VOL001, the first release on Voluminous Arts.

No More White Presidents is a multi-layered abstract film by Gavilán Rayna Russom. She began the film in 2015 and after working on it gradually over two years completed it in January of 2017. It is the first formal occurrence of the “flash film” technique that now forms the central structural device of her filmmaking practice. This technique has connections to both compositional techniques such as serialism and chance operations and craft technologies such as beading, braiding and weaving. The film engages the failures of capitalism via an extended meditation on the different forms of unreconciled dead its fallout has accumulated.

No More White Presidents Original Soundtrack

No More White Presidents Original Soundtrack Part 2

Black Meteoric Star - No More White Presidents Original Soundtrack Part 2

No More White Presidents Original Soundtrack Part 1

Black Meteoric Star - No More White Presidents Original Soundtrack - Part 1

Unofficial cat# VOL002 is Black Meteoric Star's 3 Love Songs EP.

Rayna on the release:

"The 3 Love Songs EP comes out of a live show I did at a house party. I grew up and came of age playing shows in people's houses but hadn't done it in a while. My good friends L'Amour Bleu, a New York based band I'm a big fan of asked me to play with them at their record release party. It would have been impossible to bring my normal equipment and perform my normal Black Meteoric Star set so I decided to create something stripped down and simple that would require a minimal amount of gear. Black Meteoric Star live shows often include vocal elements that don't appear on the record, but some of those elements began to creep into more recent recordings such as "No Map" on the Xecond Xoming record and the two poems I read on the NMWP Soundtrack. This stripped down and more "punk" incarnation gave me an opportunity to formalize and expand on these vocal elements. I was just beginning to truly awaken to and accept my trans feminine identity and grasped onto the idea of a love song that, defying convention, spoke about my relationship with my inner world and the elemental forces around me rather than a cherished "other", imagined or real. After performing at the event I felt the "songs' were strong enough to record and the result was this EP. As with all Black Meteoric Star music these are live takes to cassette tape with no multitracking or editing."

3 Love Songs

Love Song #2

Black Meteoric Star - Love Song #2

Unofficial cat# VOL003 is Black Meteoric Star's Ghost Frequency EP.

Rayna on Ghost Frequency:

"The title Ghost Frequency works on several levels. I was introduced to the term when I first began learning about recording techniques. It was used (usually negatively) to describe sounds that appeared on recordings due to signal interactions that resulted from “improper” mixing or recording and read as “noise” rather than the “music” that was being recorded. I became instantly fascinated with the phenomenon and intentionally creating these sounds in my recordings by deliberately using supposedly incorrect techniques has become a big part of my composing and recording process, probably the most central and consistent practice of it. I’m interested in how the presence of these sounds, and traditional production’s insistence on eradicating relates to larger ideas about the eradication of vital social practices relating to the dead such as ancestor worship, mediumship and history itself in favor of state and market dictated modes of understanding existence. The internet abounds with references to the the term, but applied to ultra low frequency or “infrasound” which can allegedly be responsible for inducing supernatural perception experiences. These posts from the margins posit a Ghost Frequency that operates on the same level as a radio station, one can simply tune into paranormal activity. It’s also a pun on an imaginary metric of how frequently ghosts might be around at any given moment. The songs on the EP employ (as does all of my music) a large amount of Ghost Frequencies (i.e. sounds that appear on the recording as the result of signal interactions rather than those sounds being performed on an instrument) and they also orient themselves toward interaction with the dead as a necessary component of human experience, and a mode of resistance to state power and it’s accompanying carceral technologies."

Ghost Frequency

Riding Shotgun

Black Meteoric Star - Riding Shotgun

Fallout Ancestor

Black Meteoric Star - Fallout Ancestor

Voluminous Arts happily announces its third official release, a 12 track digital album and accompanying 3xLP limited 3 color vinyl edition entitled “Disco” by Gavilán Rayna Russom’s elusive alias Black Meteoric Star. 

This is not a Disco record. The title deliberately troubles the music biz’s incessant tendency to hierarchize genre classification over the experience of listening. If you must categorize these mutant sounds think of them as a proposed alternate score for those long, caffeinated sessions in Abby Sciuto’s forensics lab, the soundtrack to a heavy workout in the Westchester Danger Room or perhaps the musical accompaniment to deep body investigations of your own ancestral memories. 

What this record really is, and why it’s called “Disco” has to do with the layering of time and life energy present in the spaces where we have traditionally danced to music which are sometimes called Discos. From the pounding urgency of “Muscle Machine” through the unbridled night vision romp that is “Fluid Feline Forms” and the shimmering investigations of “Whispers Between Worlds” to the extended lazer pointer focus of “I’m Unmelting” this record lays out a broad slab of practice-based research into the ghosts we connect with on the dance floor. Whether it be through partying in former industrial buildings, contested spaces of labor built on lands violently appropriated from indigenous people, uncomfortably inhabiting vacuums in queerness left by the AIDS epidemic, lifting lineages through sampling, or the relentless cycle of whitening that accompanies dance music’s march into the market, our experiences in the Disco have been permeated by the spectral and the haunted. Through rhythm and frequency, organized over time, this music blurs the veil between the living and the dead inviting those who move to it to connect with experiences beyond that false binary. 

What you have here is another fantastic Black Meteoric Star record, as always made without multitracking or overdubbing, recorded directly from single live takes. It is is utterly consistent with all that name has come to mean, but on “Disco” Black Meteoric Star’s vision has been allowed to expand into an almost mythologically epic space. Ancestral time works differently. Settle in and absorb the frequencies. As the closing track suggests, the virtual Disco these sounds evoke is for “Freaks Only”.

Disco

Freaks Only

Black Meteoric Star - Freaks Only

Purr Atraxxxxion

Black Meteoric Star - Purr Atraxxxxion

Fluid Feline Forms

Black Meteoric Star - Fluid Feline Forms

Disorienting Shapes

Black Meteoric Star - Disorienting Shapes

Muscle Machine

Black Meteoric Star - Muscle Machine

Manifesto

Black Meteoric Star - Manifesto

During periods of grieving and revelation such as this, it can be difficult to know which course to take. Sometimes only the next step is visible, sometimes not even that. The fundamental groundlessness and basic uncertainty of the human experience are brought to life and it becomes palpably clear that the dead do in fact walk among us and must be reckoned with. Conversations become critical modes of engagement with the unknown. 

Drawing on decades of using the creative medium to interrogate and challenge colonialism, capitalism and their carceral mechanisms, Gavilán Rayna Russom delivers a sonic gesture painting entitled “Road Trip Tape Summer 2020” as a contribution to those conversations. Rayna’s work often opens expanses of fluid and non-hierarchical investigation and this work, composed of two long-form pieces, is no exception. 

Conceived as the soundtrack to a road trip across a wounded but healing landscape, a journey that does not require physical movement but does insist upon spiritual growth, these pieces are the audible byproduct of the dynamic shift in Rayna’s life described in her essay “Sick” (published in Love Injection fanzine in May). Specifically, these works are an invitation to direct the drift and seeking energies associated with road trips towards an acknowledgment of the haunted shadow world that one of necessity moves through when travelling in the 21st century. That travel may be across land marred by interstates and checkpoints, through the streets of a city or town, within one’s own mind and body, through the multiple webs of data held by the internet or across oceans and vast stretches only possible to traverse by flight but it always involves negotiating with both the violent realities brought on by the colonial process and the ghosts that violence has created. 

Use these sounds as you would like, but Voluminous Arts hopes that releasing them publicly might provide restoration for those who have been using their strength to bring us to the crossroads at which we currently stand, inspiration for those conceiving of new forms, structures and worlds, sustenance for those committed to the long haul and permission for those needing to shed skins and old ideas.

Road Trip Tape Summer 2020

A Moment's Pause

Gavilan Rayna Russom - A Moment's Pause

It’s a strange time for the club; the live streams that have stepped in, attempting to hold space for all clubs used to do, are fraught with problems including accessibility barriers and surveillance. Online alternatives also seem to leave out several languages of the body; rhythmic codes, which grew deep from the roots of club culture, resonating in our cavities and on our skin, bridging the gaps between the ancestral and the immediate. The environment of the club is impossible to replicate alone. Sharing physical space on a dance floor, as was once the default, is no longer a viable option. Will it ever be again? Whether this shift is temporary or permanent, there are needs that must be met. Those of us who have traditionally found meaning, purpose, healing and connection in the dark amid the lights, sounds and bodies will need to dream new forms through which to meet those needs. This release, both for the way it speaks to the body in the present, and for the way in which it speaks to a powerful moment from the recent past, offers material for that dreaming.

Like any good track for a club, “Bloodshock” is a test of endurance; the track is dynamic and has moments for pause, before coming back up again, all while maintaining a relentless groove that mandates exploration and investment with all of one’s body. The alternate mixes (“Stripped” and “Goth Girl”) tease out different aspects of this complex and pumping web. The former homes in on those glitching, short-stopped fuzz-as-percussion sounds that punctuate growling, pulsating and re-emerging washes of synth. The latter puts emotions on suspense with a ticking clock and low passed throb, gripping you and demanding you stay put until it gives into a sensuously unfolding, dark candy arpeggios syncopating for most of the bar, then lining up with the beat by the end, wielding tension and release, denial and reward like a skilled dominatrix. Outlier B-side “Blessed” receives a PhD in not giving a fuck for its obsessive embrace of repetition’s ability to provoke ecstasy, as screaming bursts of synth streak across the frequency spectrum within a tightly held grid of pulsing kicks and hats. Each meditation on "Bloodshock" demands attention while also allowing a fluid expanse of experiences to grow out, in manifold ways, from its discrete set of source materials.

The tracks on Bloodshock turned up while Rayna was searching through old hard drives. They come from some point in the stretch of years when she was doing a monthly residency at Brooklyn’s Bossa Nova Civic Club. The fact that her studio was across the street meant she could work fluidly between the roles of DJ and producer, often testing out a track during an earlier set, tweaking it in her studio during a break and trying an improved version during a second set later the same night. Bossa at that time was a special place, one where the poetics and social frameworks of hip hop, punk, goth and dance music were reconnecting and mingling authentically after being segregated and commodified through whitened market interests in the previous two decades. It was an important gathering spot for a whole wave of New Yorkers in need of somewhere to be complex and real. The material on this EP didn’t fit into Rayna’s discography at the time, so these tracks were relegated to making occasional appearances in her DJ sets until the launch of Voluminous Arts created the opportunity to publicly present a more authentic picture of her expansive vision.

The team at Voluminous Arts had a meeting about this release and Rayna said, “well this is a club banger, but what’s a club banger for in a world without clubs? I think a ‘live stream banger’ is maybe something different”. We all laughed but the heartbreak was also palpable.

Bloodshock

Pain Slut - Bloodshock

Jamaica Queens born artist Rat Porridge’s work is layered, complex and presents multiple entry points from which one can absorb its potent combination of intensities. One of these is the translucent green of the cassette tape and cover artwork that hold her inaugural release on Voluminous Arts in physical form. Another is the title of this debut album, Live from the Plant. 

Together these two creative choices already present an interwoven set of meanings and associations that allow entry to the depths that lie within her surging condensations of sonic information. The color green evokes both effusive botanical growth and the toxic sludge produced by manufacturing, while the words “Live” and “Plant” evoke similar associations through language. In her own words, “it’s very multi-meaning, the ‘plant’ is the organic plant of earth, and then there’s the ‘plant’ of the industrial plant. The plant could be a lot of different things, and it’s all those things.” 

On Live from the Plant, Rat Porridge uses the permeable and malleable properties of sound to engage the relationships between these multiple meanings in ways that orient themselves towards healing and towards ancestral time, rather than colonial models of binary opposition and categorization. Space and its relationship to the body is a core concept connecting multiple threads of meanings in Rat’s work. Her songs are permeated by field recordings, gathered from spaces, such as shuttered shopping areas, within her environment that have been left empty of commerce and full of possibility after outliving their use to extractive commodity-based market interests. They also reverberate with the physical spaces in which they were recorded; bedroom and basement, critical and traditional sites of underground artistic exploration and community building. Her voice resonates from within the space of her physical body and echoes back from the rooms she works in, creating one of many cumulative forms of repetition present in the work. 

Repetition also plays a role in her lyrics, which repeat enough times to give listeners added meaning with each engagement. This awareness of space, and of one’s place and power within it grows from her engagement with performance art, activism and the communities she is a part of. As one listens to the album, it becomes a transcription of these interrelated activities, one that charts a trajectory of both individual and collective healing as she ecstatically expands on the rhythmic cycling present in both dance floor oriented music and what mental health practitioners refer to as “circular thinking”. 

With repetition and a circular continuity at their pulsing core, Rat Porridge’s works on Live from the Plant unleash a regimentation-shattering energy that is saturated with multiple temporalities, locations and emotions. Rat’s music, with all of its texture and performance, subverts expectations of what healing art should be: “I feel like there’s an association with so-called ‘healing’ music that it should only be soft, ambient or like easy listening or something like that… relaxing… I listen to things like that, and it's not like I’m not using some of those sounds… but there’s something with just like addressing the brokenness, or addressing the really difficult parts as well, that is like, a step towards the deeper healing.... I’m opening up and so is the art.”

Live from the Plant

Eternal

Rat Porridge - Eternal

At the end of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 15 hour serial film Berlin Alexanderplatz, viewers are treated to a 2 hour epilogue permeated with snippets of Kraftwerk, dream sequences, fog and elements of drag. In the relentless spirit of that kind of head fucking, one proposal for how you might think of Black Meteoric Star’s new album NYC Beat Boxx is as a similar kind of psychedelic epilogue to last year’s epic 3xLP Disco. The comparison isn’t frivolous or light, considering Black Meteoric Star’s sound emerged during the time Rayna was living in Berlin. That city’s energy has continued to reverberate within the music she creates under the alias. While the queer creative legacies of Berlin remain, on Beat Boxx geographic focus shifts to New York, where Rayna lived from 1997 - 2004 and where she’s made her home since returning from Berlin in 2009.

With this explicit geolocation, NYC Beat Boxx draws inspiration from vinyl “beat collections”, which heavily circulated in New York during the 80’s, such as Apexton’s Rhythm Masters series. The beats on those records, conceived more as functional sonic tools rather than fully realized tracks, have an uncanny ability to crystallize the feeling of a moment within their repetitive minimalism. Some titles directly refer to this ability, such as “Acid 3am” and “One Night In The Bronx''. The Black Meteoric Star project consistently utilizes a tape deck Rayna was gifted for her high school graduation to function as a sort of sketchbook for ideas; this record is no exception. NYC Beat Boxx began while Rayna was still recovering from Covid-19 and unable to engage a full studio of equipment. Instead she focussed on drum beats alone, building tracks on an analog drum machine that were nearly complete without the addition of synths or vocals. Covid hit New York City particularly hard in those initial months of the pandemic and in March, April and May of 2020 the experiences New Yorkers were having with it were nearly categorically different from those of most U.S. residents because of the ways in which New York’s rhythm and culture of the street allowed the virus to spread quickly before quarantine measures were put in place. Even in its completed form, with synthesizer and vocal elements added sparingly, NYC Beat Boxx is both a celebration and evocation of New York, through rhythms that channel that same uncanny ability of the “beat collection” to archive specific moments in time and space. Club music has the distinct pleasure and purpose of giving us the opportunity to process emotions through our bodies, through dance; the rhythmic repetitions of beats, enticing meditations of sound. This offering by Black Meteoric Star honors New York’s history of consistently giving space for the healing that dance music provides, during the extremely challenging and isolating time which we continue to live through.

As Voluminous Arts’ lucky 13th release, NYC Beat Boxx also creates an opportunity to reflect on what the New York based label has accomplished in its first 18 months. In addition to releasing a spectrum of Rayna’s music; from newly recorded intimate cassettes like Transverberation, to archival gems like Crash Convention and RFNAL, to the previously mentioned epic Black Meteoric Star 3xLP Disco, the label also organized the first iteration of a now annual two day conference on nightlife; the Halloquium, and released Philadelphia based multidisciplinary artist Rat Porridge’s debut album Live from the Plant. Voluminous Arts also launched the articles section of its website, proposing new and more substantive ideas about the possibilities of music journalism.

NYC Beat Boxx

Hey Asshole

Black Meteoric Star - Hey Asshole

Pan Con Pan

Black Meteoric Star - Pan Con Pan

Billy Stopless

Black Meteoric Star - Billy Stopless

Legg's Egg

Black Meteoric Star - Legg's Egg

Strobes, Haze, Passion

Black Meteoric Star - Strobes, Haze, Passion

Luminol

Black Meteoric Star - Luminol

Risper Doll

Black Meteoric Star - Risper Doll

Traffic Light in Fog at a Crossroads

Black Meteoric Star - Traffic Light in Fog at a Crossroads

Bells

Black Meteoric Star - Bells

Soundwords

Worth in Dirt

Jentlemen - Worth In Dirt

Track Pack Vol I

Eschatological Tinnitus Blocker

Eris Drew - Eschatological Tinnitus Blocker

Track Pack Volume I

Babygirl Acid

Scotia - Babygirl Acid

Charmer

ANNIHIL - Charmer

Reflection (lorenshadow edit)

Celes - Reflection (lorenshadow edit)

Crystal Peñalosa - Not Here To Ask, But To Collect

Lucía Beyond + Jeani Quimera - Lover

Hole Vision is an ongoing experiment in breaking and dissolving borders through the sonic expressions and experiences of trans artists in the NYC local community and far beyond its boundaries. Hosts Crystal and Rico create a sonic conversation drawing on their own experiences as trans people whose lives have been crisscrossed by the U.S. border. Hole Vision is a project of Voluminous Arts, a NYC based organization dedicated to the experimental artistic culture of transgender people and communities.

https://www.instagram.com/voluminousarts 
https://www.instagram.com/sodomahigomorra 
https://www.instagram.com/flautawitch

https://www.soundcloud.com/voluminousarts https://www.soundcloud.com/sodomahigomorra



Hole Vision with Sodomahigomorra and Crystal Peñalosa @ The Lot Radio 02-20-2025

Hole Vision is an ongoing experiment in breaking and dissolving borders through the sonic expressions and experiences of trans artists in the NYC local community and far beyond its boundaries. 

Hosts Crystal and Rico create a sonic conversation drawing on their own experiences as trans people whose lives have been crisscrossed by the U.S. border. 

Hole Vision is a project of Voluminous Arts, a NYC based organization dedicated to the experimental artistic culture of transgender people and communities.

https://www.instagram.com/voluminousarts 
https://www.instagram.com/sodomahigomorra 
https://www.instagram.com/flautawitch

https://www.soundcloud.com/voluminousarts 
https://www.soundcloud.com/sodomahigomorra

Hole Vision with Sodomahigomorra and Crystal Peñalosa @ The Lot Radio 03-20-2025

"Spirit Time" explores experimental music as an embodied spiritual technology, bearer of ancestral memory, and an access point to the Void. This inaugural episode features original music by Mercury Symbol, Rat Porridge, Lucy York, Ethel Cain, Lil Ugly Mane, Hiro Kone & Drew McDowall, E+E, Laura Rivers, Parvathy Baul, and Mirrored Fatality. In Memory of Láwû (Mango) Makuriye’nte

Voluminous Art presents: Spirit Time w/ Rat Porridge & Mercury Symbol [27.03.25]

Hole Vision is an ongoing experiment in breaking and dissolving borders through the sonic expressions and experiences of trans artists in the NYC local community and far beyond its boundaries. 

Hosts Crystal and Rico create a sonic conversation drawing on their own experiences as trans people whose lives have been crisscrossed by the U.S. border. 

Hole Vision is a project of Voluminous Arts, a NYC based organization dedicated to the experimental artistic culture of transgender people and communities.

https://www.instagram.com/voluminousarts 
https://www.instagram.com/sodomahigomorra 
https://www.instagram.com/flautawitch

https://www.soundcloud.com/voluminousarts 
https://www.soundcloud.com/sodomahigomorra



Hole Vision with Sodomahigomorra and Crystal Peñalosa @ The Lot Radio 04-17-2025

In The Mix" is Voluminous Arts' mix series featuring sets recorded via our DJ Access Program, through which we provide free of charge access to DJ equipment to anyone self-identifying as transgender. Trans people interested in learning to DJ, upcoming or accomplished Trans DJs are able to hone their skills, record high quality mixes, and livestream.

Voluminous Arts is expanding to become a cultural arts center for trans people and trans culture to thrive. Support our work: withfriends.co/voluminous_arts/join

Voluminous Arts: In The Mix 009 — Crystal Peñalosa

Voluminous Arts: In The Mix 010 — Sodomahigomorra

Voluminous Arts: In The Mix 011 — Janus Rose

Voluminous Arts: In The Mix 012 — stuttersprite

Voluminous Arts: In The Mix 013 — DjLamby88

Voluminous Arts: In The Mix 014 — dj listen to ur heart

Voluminous Arts: In The Mix 015 — Lunática B2B Lasokko

Voluminous Art presents: Spirit Time with Rat Porridge & Mercury Symbol  [30.04.25]

Hole Vision with Sodomahigomorra and Crystal Peñalosa @ The Lot Radio 05-15-2025

Voluminous Arts presents: Spirit Time with Rat Porridge & Mercury Symbol: "Spirit Time" explores experimental music as an embodied spiritual technology, bearer of ancestral memory, and an access point to the Void. This month’s episode features original music by Mercury Symbol, Rat Porridge, Samantha Hinds, and Kwami Winfield. Dedicated in loving memory to Eve Glenn. 

Voluminous Art presents: Spirit Time with Rat Porridge & Mercury Symbol [28.05.25]

Hole Vision with Sodomahigomorra and Crystal Peñalosa @ The Lot Radio 06-12-2025

Building new worlds through trans-centered experimental creativity.
Established by Gavilán Rayna Russom.

Voluminous Arts

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