somesurprises' album Perseids is out on Doom Trip Records Friday, April 19. by Dave Segal

Of the thousands of bands I've talked to as a music journalist, somesurprises are the most soft-spoken. Their absolutely chill voices barely register on the playback of our interview, which took place in their Fremont rehearsal space, ExEx Audio. And this chillness seeps into the Seattle quartet's extraordinary music, which alchemizes a few of the finest rock strains—space, kraut, and shoegaze—into songs that massage your mind and tingle your body with subtle insistence.

Led by guitarist/vocalist/songwriter Natasha El-Sergany, somesurprises began as her bedroom solo project in 2012-2013. It expanded to a duo when guitarist/synthesist Josh Medina joined in 2015. The highly skilled rhythm section of bassist Laura Seniow and drummer Benjamin Thomas-Kennedy—who replaced Emma Danner and Nico Sophiea, respectively—fill out the lineup.

They've been in serious grind mode in the weeks leading up to the April 20 Tractor Tavern release party for their second album as a full-fledged band, Perseids, which LA's Doom Trip Records issues on April 19. A live appearance on KEXP follows on April 22 at the ungodly time of 9:30 am.

Clearly, momentum's building for somesurprises. They've been one of Seattle's most enthralling rock groups since 2017's Alt, but Perseids is their most melodically sophisticated and rich-sounding collection to date. Paurl Walsh—who's played in an experimental duo with Medina for years—expertly engineered and produced the record. 

<a href="https://somesurprises.bandcamp.com/album/perseids">Perseids by somesurprises</a>

Five years have passed since their self-titled LP on Drawing Room Records; much of that silence was due to COVID-19, of course, but also somesurprises decided to extensively labor over these nine songs, most of which El-Sergany wrote during the worst months of the pandemic. Plus, working with a limited budget and holding down demanding jobs further delayed things. El-Segany recalls one Thanksgiving weekend where "we were [in the studio] going insane for eight hours with a really loud [imitates a metronome's ticks], killing the vibe completely."

She adds, "The long process allowed us to add new parts to songs and even new lyrics, so I wasn't playing as I was writing lyrics; I was just able to listen and really see what it made me feel like. That was a benefit, too."

In addition, Medina's ability to spontaneously create parts to El-Sergany's songs has improved over the years. He also praises Walsh's ability to layer and overdub sounds, and the two's telepathic musical relationship helped the band to reach new heights. "He did a little bit of what we refer to as 'dub production,' throwing drums through delay and things like that. We've developed as a band and as individuals with Paurl's help, as well." 

The extra effort—plus contributions from avant-garde cellist Lori Goldston and vocalist/Persian poetry scholar Jessika Kenney (both Stranger Geniuses)—has paid off handsomely. The album opens with somesurprises' boldest stab for a hit single in these shoegaze-friendly times, "Be Reasonable." With its frictionless, laid-back motorik groove, it captures the feeling of an easygoing ramble down the Autobahn. While listening, one feels bedazzled and adrift with cool-breeze pleasure. "Bodymind" is a pulsating swell of overdriven klang while "Why I Stay" begins as a hypnotic and moving waltz-time ballad before the song gloriously ascends and expands to blot out the sky. On "Ship Circles," Goldston's cello adds sinuous beauty and gravity to this mesmerizing, hushed ballad, complementing El-Sergany's voice, which is at once icy and deeply moving. "Untitled" is a gorgeous, contemplative instrumental somewhere between Opal and early Felt. Tip: listen to this record on good headphones to catch the enthralling microscopic details and the jaw-dropping, macroscopic scope.

The LP's longest song at 8:09, "Perseids" is a masterclass in building suspense. The rhythm clicks swiftly and metronomically while a cyclical, spangled guitar riff tingles synapses. Then comes a soft explosion into a six-stringed meteor shower amid some intricate, magical bass/drum interplay, as Kenney steps to the mic to recite a poem by 14th-century spiritualist Hafez about the Islamic lore of demons being vanquished by meteors. 

El-Sergany elaborates on this theme: "After this album and song became centered around the idea of meteors and meteor showers, our three birthdays [Natasha, Josh, and Laura's] being in Leo season, at the peak of meteor showers, I thought surely there must be some meaning behind this in my faith. So I looked into it and, yeah, the first image that I came across is that of demons being struck down because they couldn't reach the heavens. It seemed a little cartoonish in my mind; I couldn't grasp it." Fortuitously, Goldston's friend Kenney was in town while somesurprises were recording Perseids, so they invited her to bring her knowledge and dramatic vocal stylings to the studio.

The Hafez poem that Kenney suggested revealed the metaphor's meaning to El-Sergany. "Even in Western discourse, people use the term 'demons' to mean the things they're struggling with personally. But [the poem] talked about the demon of grief and this image of meteors being able to strike out the demon of grief. And I thought that was powerful because you seem like you're a whole person regardless of what has happened to you, and understanding that and being able to transform the trauma or the bad thing that's happened to you into part of your story can therefore eliminate the power that that thing has over you. I was really inspired by that."

Throughout the album, I note, there seems to be a tension between angst-ridden lyrics and liberating music. El-Sergany agrees. "Because you can't really have one without the other. You can't get to the liberation part without the struggle. I do like to think about dream spaces where everything is the way it should be. And maybe that's not so different from being in the struggle, too. As long as you're moving toward some kind of truth, you're already there."

Only in dreams. COURTESY OF DOOM TRIP

When The Stranger interviewed El-Sergany in 2017 for a Person of Interest feature, she said, "I'm not going for escapism so much as attempting to create space for reflection on themes of love, loss, and isolation. I think it's really important to stay human now and stay connected to your imagination. So I hope that our album can help people do that." Is that still the case? "Yes. Well said," she laughs. 

Does El-Sergany view somesurprises as a vehicle to create positive change in the world? "Not really, but I think it's a way to connect with people in a really authentic way."

On Perseids, there's less reliance on motorik rhythms compared to past releases, partially due to El-Sergany writing most of the songs by herself. Also, she was listening to a lot of Cluster—especially Cluster 71 and Cluster & Eno—which led to her "wanting to have more color than structure. There was one year where I was in the .01% top listeners to Cluster on Spotify. I wear that as a badge of honor. I always liked melodic music and actual songs."

That being said, somesurprises' motorik songs work really well live. "That's what gets people dancing most of the time," Seniow observes. Medina adds, "We always laugh when everyone just wants to hear us play one chord loudly." The thing is, it's a good chord.

What happens if somesurprises get really popular? Do they quit their jobs and dedicate their lives to the band? Or will it still be a side hustle? "It's been a really slow burn and we expect that to continue," El-Sergany says. Medina says he'd never quit his job as an administrator at a Montessori school, nor would El-Sergany leave her job as an immigration lawyer. And neither would compromise their art in order to break through.

"I feel principled, to a fault, maybe, and Natasha's the same way," Medina says. "We shoot ourselves in the foot all the time," El-Sergany admits. They turned down an invitation to appear on Band in Seattle and they almost got on Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown in 2017. "That was crazy," El-Sergany says. "But they turned us down. We would've totally done it." 

"It blew my mind, because I recorded this song ["Mayor Skipped Town" from 2017's Serious Dreams] on a cassette tape and they want to use it on national television," Medina says. "I thought, 'This is a joke...'"

"It was a fun thing to be able to tell my mom, you know?" El-Sergany says. "They wanted to play it while Tony was riding the ferry to the clambake on Bainbridge Island or something, and then have synchronized swimmers. It sounded very elaborate."

With shoegaze gaining widespread popularity now—particularly from what I've gleaned secondhand from TikTok—are somesurprises angling to cash in on the craze? "I have a TikTok account, but so far I get like seven views on things," El-Sergany says. "I'm trying to go viral, but it hasn't worked yet. Maybe I need to do more skits or something."

"I told her the magic would be covering pop songs in her reverbed-out way," Medina says. "And do some actual magic tricks," Thomas-Kennedy advises.

With deadpan snark, El-Sergany says, "Okay, I'm on it."

somesurprises play Tractor Tavern on Saturday April 20 at 8:30 pm with Coral Grief and Anthers.

naamahdarling:

littlemizzlinguistics:

Studying linguistics is actually so wonderful because when you explain youth slang to older professors, instead of complaining about how “your generation can’t speak right/ you’re butchering the language” they light up and go “really? That’s so wonderful! What an innovative construction! Isn’t language wonderful?“

And you too can be like this! Without even being a professor!

medeae:

Anne Carson, ‘Wildly Constant’, London Review of Books

Last month, critics of Eric Adams who’ve wanted the camera-friendly, hard-partying mayor to publicly answer for his tough-on-crime agenda got some catharsis. Adams appeared on the popular hip-hop morning radio show The Breakfast Club alongside an activist and political commentator named Olayemi Olurin. She held Adams verbally captive from the jump, needling the mayor for bragging that New York City is safe while also using “fearmongering” rhetoric to justify a bigger police presence. “Is it safe or is it not?” she asked. The mayor, so used to deploying charisma or bluster to evade criticism, instead stuttered, squirmed in his chair, and turned his back on Olurin to face the show’s hosts. “You would realize how I turned the city around if you follow everything I do,” Adams told Olurin. “I would say ‘no,’ but we can get to that,” she snapped back.

Olurin had been preparing for this moment for years. Since Adams’s election she’d used every available platform, from social media to op-eds to media appearances, to attack his handling of Rikers Island, the migrant crisis, homelessness, and bail reform. (AOC is a “big fan” and John Oliver once gave her a shout-out on his show.) For the better part of 50 minutes, she forced Adams to explain his support for policies that criminalize poor Black New Yorkers. Any time he questioned her facts, Olurin, a former public defender, cited reports and statistics to back them up. The dressing-down came at a particularly vulnerable time for Adams, with his approval rating in the toilet, a federal investigation into his campaign looming, and a sexual-assault lawsuit to fight. “Someone call in a wellness check on the Eric Adams comms team,” one reporter wrote on X after the interview aired. The former editor-in-chief of Rolling Stone called it “the most important interview of Eric Adams in a long, long time.”

On a sunny Friday afternoon the following week, I meet up with the 30-year-old to take a walk in Flatbush, one of the Black working-class communities Adams claims to represent and where Olurin lives. We pass the bodega where they know her sandwich order (Salsalito turkey with Sazón, jalapeños, and cheese) and a boutique filled with mannequins wearing colorful head wraps where she recently got her measurements taken for a dress. “It’s so Caribbean and it reminds me of home,” the Bahamas native tells me. She says “hi” to strangers as she bounds down the street. “I literally walk my neighborhood any time of night,” she says. “Never has any crime happened to me, I’ve never felt unsafe, none of that.” In just five minutes of walking, we see six cops. Olurin points out a police van and two officers standing guard outside a playground where three boys are playing basketball. “He becomes mayor and this is what we get,” she says. “This is a Black neighborhood. And so we have an exorbitant amount of police.”

When I say I hate Eric Adams, it really means I hate what he stands for. If Eric Adams resigned tomorrow, you would never hear me say his name again.

Lately, Olurin feels like she has a target on her back. The NYPD’s top brass have been going after her on social media since the interview, in which she’d said Adams seems to care more about a cop who was recently killed during a traffic stop than the “at least seven” civilians killed by NYPD officers this year. “This ‘Movement Laywer’ [sic] epitomizes everything that true NYers are against !” the NYPD’s chief of patrol wrote on X; the deputy commissioner piled on. Watching the NYPD lose “the fight in the court of public opinion online,” she says, “makes me nervous. Are these people gonna retaliate and do something in real life.” As an attorney, Olurin is well aware of her rights. But as a Black woman, she also knows that officers could violate those rights at any time. For two weeks, Olurin didn’t go out on her daily five-mile walk. Her doctor told her she was under high stress and gave her a heart monitor. She took down the Bahamian flag hanging outside of her apartment window, worried that officers would find out where she lives. “They’ll probably identify me,” she says. “How many Bahamian Nigerians are there?”

Inside her apartment, though, Olurin is at ease. Wearing a shirt that says “May all the motherfuckers who spite me burn in hell for all of eternity,” she sits cross-legged on a purple couch, the walls around her covered with images of Tupac, Malcolm X, and characters from Dragon Ball Z and The Boondocks, all made by Black artists. She tells me she was raised by strict parents who saw three career options for their five children: doctor, lawyer, or engineer. Olurin was the natural debater of the bunch. To watch a Harry Potter movie, she had to convince her grandmother via PowerPoint presentation that the film wouldn’t corrupt her brain. She also coaxed her parents into letting her attend high school in the U.S. so that she could more easily become a lawyer. At her West Virginia boarding school, Olurin was voted “most opinionated,” which came as something of a shock. Bahamians tend to be boisterous, so “I never thought of myself as a loud person that has this animated personality,” she says, raising her hands.

She was also the only Black girl in her high-school senior class. Olurin remembers one of her classmates saying that “Black people can’t swim and that we like chicken and watermelon or whatever.” Bahamians are always in the ocean and have no preference for either of those foods; she was confused. “I hadn’t figured out the word racist yet,” she says. “I knew something wasn’t adding up, but it was hard for me to navigate.” She went on to Ohio University, where she minored in African American studies, watched the Ferguson protests unfold, and decided to become a public defender so that she could help fight systemic racism.

Once she moved to New York for law school, Olurin was so broke that she struggled to afford subway fare. “I understood deeply what it was like to be poor in the city,” she says, “and to have that be received so negatively.” After graduating in 2018, she got a job with the Legal Aid Society, where she spent her days arguing that her clients didn’t deserve jail time for petty crimes like jumping a subway turnstile. In 2021, she posted a video that appeared to show an NYPD officer kneeling on one of her client’s necks to Twitter. She got the charges dismissed, and the media attention made her realize she could have more of an impact on the criminal-justice system by becoming an advocate. She was also becoming disenchanted with Legal Aid. “It’s incredibly stressful. It’s incredibly underpaid,” she says. Olurin quit at the end of 2022 to become, as she puts it, a “professional loudmouth.”

While paying her bills with a full-time job helping criminal-justice reform advocates to craft their messaging in the media, she started a YouTube channel last year. It hosts lively podcasts where she and guests debate topics like, “Are More Black People Becoming Republican?” as well as political deep-dives, including a two-hour-long magnum opus branding Adams “the Worst Mayor in America” over his support for racist policing policies like stop and frisk. She has a loose-lipped, energetic style in these videos that’s a stark contrast to the talking heads on cable news. She swears, wears bright-red lipstick, and calls herself “a bitch who’s chronically online.”

Olurin first appeared on The Breakfast Club in 2022 to talk about criminal-justice issues. After she criticized the program for platforming Candace Owens in March, co-host Charlamagne tha God called Olurin and invited her back to square off with the mayor. She doubted Adams would actually show up to their interview — “I think I am his loudest critic” — but threw herself into prep anyway. She sourced every stat she planned to quote, from the 31 people who have died on Rikers Island on Adams’s watch to the $17 million he cut from the jail’s programming budget. A defense attorney “has to be in tune with the facts,” she says. “A cross-examination is basically being able to call out the discrepancies.”

I understood deeply what it was like to be poor in the city, and to have that be received so negatively.

It still came as a surprise to Olurin when Charlamagne told her Adams was en route to the studio. “Don’t hold back,” he told her. “Ask him whatever you want.” She viewed this as permission to go scorched-earth, a luxury she knows many members of the City Hall press corps don’t have. “I went into it with the recognition that this is never happening again,” she says. She did her best Olivia Pope impression — “I had to give all Black people the version of a lawyer they like to see” — and though the left praised her for delivering a knockout, Olurin thought she was “nice and polite” to Adams. “In a normal world, I wouldn’t let you shout over me,” she says. “This is me giving grace.”

Olurin hasn’t gotten any of the agent, book-deal, or pundit-contract offers that can come with viral fame since the interview aired, though. “That says a lot to me about what the media is really invested in seeing.” While she’d love a plush commentator job at a big network, Olurin’s not surprised that her phone isn’t ringing; she says “it’s often the media helping steer this ‘copaganda.’” (Olurin is, however, doing a one-off CNN appearance to analyze the Trump hush-money trial.) She feels the biggest payoff from the appearance has been attracting tens of thousands of new followers. “I feel like I always had a large white audience by virtue of being a lawyer,” she says. “But this allowed a lot of Black people who weren’t previously familiar with my work to see it.” Her ultimate goal is to have “an advocacy version of Issa Rae’s career,” she says. “I want to have my own production company and have my own platform that’s big enough to garner the traffic.”

Olurin stresses that her beef with Adams is not personal. “When I say I hate Eric Adams, it really means I hate what he stands for,” she says. “If Eric Adams resigned tomorrow, you would never hear me say his name again.” That said, it may be just a little bit personal. She and Adams exchanged numbers after the interview at Charlamagne’s urging, and the mayor texted her a few hours later to ask about the origins of her name. She told him it’s Nigerian and means “affluence befits me,” to which he responded with a yellow-skin-toned prayer-hands emoji. She found the detail “incredibly telling,” given that Adams “uses his Blackness as a convenience to sell us on, but who has no real attachment to it or community.” “I’ve never in my life seen a Black person not change the color of this emoji,” she says. “That tickled me greatly. I laughed.”

The earliest teachings of the Buddha offer us a mindful path of spiritual awakening through expanding our awareness of change. This user-friendly invitation accords with our experience of everyday life. All around us, wherever we are, wherever we go, the seasons change, our environments are changing, cultures gradually shift and transform. In our families and communities, loved ones are dying and babies are being born. Over time, we experience small and large changes in our bodies and minds, constantly flowing currents of different physical sensations, emotions, thoughts.

These ceaseless changes are the experiential basis of the Buddha’s quiet proclamation of the truth of “no solid self.” Let’s pause for a moment to consider this, as the Buddha’s primary teaching of selflessness might not seem to agree with our experience. “No self?” we may ask. “If that’s true, then who is reading (or writing) these words?”

The unexamined self feels like an isolated, self-sufficient, permanent individual, essentially separate from others and all that surrounds it.

Before we closely examine our experience, many of us assume we are essentially the same person throughout our lives. We are born, grow up, develop, and mature. All of that is my experience; all of that happens to me. We feel certain that there is a constant “I” somewhere near the center of all our experiences, though we are somewhat unclear about the precise nature of this assumed-to-be enduring essence.

So the great path of awakening begins with asking ourselves a tiny question: “What is the experience of being me?”

Even though I’ve heard the basic Buddhist teachings of impermanence and no self for many years, I often proceed through my day on automatic pilot, acting as though I’m an autonomous, sovereign self. I feel and act as though I’m a completely independent, permanent person. Right here in the midst of the swirling tempests of everyday events rapidly arising and falling away, I continue to act as though I have an infinite stretch of time before me. My actions and inaction suggest I feel I will live forever, even though, rationally, I understand the truth of impermanence. Yes, of course I can admit that things are always changing, but still I wonder: isn’t there a rock-solid unchanging “me” hidden somewhere underneath it all?

This unexamined self feels like an isolated, self-sufficient, permanent individual, essentially separate from others and all that surrounds it. Yet even a few moments of self-reflection suggests otherwise. My body is not the same as when I was eight or eighteen years old. If all humans are mortal, then my life will also end, exact time of departure unknown. Similarly, all my feelings of happiness and sadness come and go, arise and cease, changing gradually or suddenly, but always, inevitably, changing.

Looking closely, I also see that I’m not a self-contained, entirely independent individual. I need food, water, and air to survive. I speak and write a language generously passed on to me by others from long ago. I engage in everyday activities that were all part of my cultural training from childhood onward: brushing my teeth, exchanging greetings of “good morning” and saying “good night,” attending ceremonies, weddings, funerals.

Even at the most basic level of existence, I did not arise as a spontaneous, self-created human being. I was born and nurtured through the union and love of my parents, and they are also descendants of many ancestors before them. We are all “dependently related” beings, developing and aging in rapidly changing societies.

So what? Why does all this matter? Because when we ignore these basic truths, we suffer. When we conduct our lives as though, all evidence to the contrary, we are separate, permanent, unitary selves, we find ourselves constantly living in fear of the large, looming shadow of change. Actions based on a mistaken sense of self, or “ego,” as an unchanging, isolated essence are filled with anxious struggle. We fight many futile battles against the way things actually are. How are they really? They are changing, connected, fluid. It’s as though we are standing waist-deep in the middle of a rushing river, our arms outstretched wide, straining to stop the flow.

This mistaken sense of self arises as a solidified set of beliefs about who we are and how the world is. When we proceed on that basis, all our life experiences are filtered through a rigorous, simplistic, for-and-against screening process: “Will this person or event enhance my permanent sense of self? Will this encounter threaten the ideas I’ve already accumulated?” Believing the inner voice of deception, we grasp and defend and ignore in service to an illusion, causing suffering for ourselves and others.

Letting go of the false sense of self feels liberating, like being released from a claustrophobic prison of mistaken view. What a relief to discover that we don’t have to pretend to be something we’re not! The initially surprising and challenging news of “no solid self” turns out to be a gentle invitation into a more spacious approach to living and being with others. Releasing fixation on permanence goes hand in hand with taking brave steps toward more communication and harmony in our lives, our actions, our relationships, and our work.

We might call this fluid inter-being an “open self,” one that is more sensitive to other living beings and nature. This open sense of self allows us to proceed from empathy and compassion for ourselves and for those suffering around us and elsewhere. With the dissolving of the seemingly solid walls of ego’s fragile tower, our experience is porous and permeable, less cut off and isolated. As we gradually release the old commitment to conquering the unconquerable, to denying the undeniable, we explore the many genuine and fresh possibilities in our ever-changing situation.

The post What “No Self” Really Means appeared first on Lion’s Roar.

Octavia Butler and the Pimply, Pompous Publisher
fantastic story about a teenage sci-fi fan that convinced a respected author to contribute a legitimately influential piece about race and science fiction to his single issue zine. He even had the audacity to give her notes.