Trade School is thrilled to welcome the bay-area publisher Ratskin Records to LA for a weekend of events. Featuring performances by Sehseiyah, the solo avant industrial-pop project and alias for Los Angeles-based visual, recording, and performance artist Sepehr Mashiahof (fka The Bedroom Witch) as well as qarînah / قرينه, the solo noisey-trashbeat driven solo project of LA based multi-disciplinary artist Sin (fka Genital Quartz). Our evening concludes with a trio performance by The Burgon-Magill-Trammell Trio (Marshall Trammell, Shelley Burgon, and Rob Magill).
Ratskin Records is a collective record label and archival imprint championing decolonial experimental music centered in the Bay Area. We focus on LGBTQ+, Black, Native, POC, and disabled artists who create work that is sonically and politically pushing boundaries toward liberation. We work together to create an alternative to an industry that has historically exploited and devalued artist labor and requires artists to exhaust themselves to fulfill their life’s passion. We see the work of decolonial artists as world-building activism that centers empathy and basic human needs. The crux of our work is centered in engaging the healing power of sound for communities in struggle. \ \ Our goal is to pay and provide material resources for artists whose work lies on the margins of mainstream consumption. Our work is multifaceted in that we take multiple avenues to address issues around accountability, accessibility, racism, transphobia, and other systems of oppression. Ratskin is curation centered in its practice and provides resources for artists to create self-determined spaces.
The Burgon-Magill-Trammell Trio is a conspiracy of interwoven sounds that redefine the very meaning and expectations of the word "impact." Whether plucking strings, vibrating reeds or striking heads, the harp-saxophone-drum ensemble assembles shapes in the medium of t/Time. Together, their touches resound in convivial harmonies that configure the virtues of their solidarity relationships in today's undreamy political landscape.
Shelley Burgon (LA)- harp - shelleyburgon.bandcamp.com/album/the-in-between
Rob Magill (Ojai)- saxophone - Weird Cry Records: www.weirdcryrecords.com
Marshall Trammell (US/BE)- drum kit - Music Research Strategies: linktr.ee/music_research_strategies
qarînah is the solo noisey-trashbeat driven solo project of LA based multi-disciplinary artist Sin (fka Genital Quartz). This project draws from the memorial wells of pain, redemption, and the futures of their ancestors- transmuted into virility. An orgone accumulator of psychedelic amounts of grief. Everyday social miscommunications, paradigm breakdowns, technological failures, and the slow entropy of the empire become tools of cacophony for their farces. Their sexual and gender confusion do not obfuscate but alleviate the duality between the natural from the synthetic.
A qarînah or قرينه is an Egyptian spirit, most similar to a succubus, who visits its victims only in dreams. To this day it is said that men who are haunted by them find themselves exhausted upon awakening, having been deprived of any nourishment from rest. Much like jinn, they are invisible to all except those who possess the “second sight” (often a cat, dog, or other household pet). The only way to be freed from one may be achieved through ritual to appeal the god(s) for divine protection and intervention. Every performance is a spell for the collective liberation of what’s left of humanity and the complete annihilation of white supremacy.