'Birth in Reverse', live improvised performance with backwards Tascam recording, May 2021.
On the day my niece was born, we weren't sure if she was going to make it due to health complications. I needed to find some way to pray. Not knowing what else to do, I recorded all of my prayers as spontaneous songs into a four-track recorder I had in my apartment. I put all of the force of my own will to live (waking myself up to remember what that even felt like) into the recording, spurring her towards us across the border between this world and somewhere else. I subsequently forgot about it. A month later, I was looking for a tape I could record other things on. I noticed I had a tape already in the four-track, but it was completely full on the A side. Forgetting how tape recording works, I flipped it onto the B side to start recording there. Thankfully, before I pressed record, I checked to see if there was anything already on the B side. I heard what sounded like holy music, in a foreign tongue. It was beautiful. It turned out that it was the made-up prayer-song Iβd made for my niece on the A side, only played in reverse. The life force in it was palpable and moving. I was removed enough from myself to be able to really hear and recognize myself. I saw that my deep need for Marina to arrive was also the deep need I had for ME to arrive more fully, too. Marina is almost a year old now. She fought so hard to come into this world and it made me re-choose being here too. I recorded a new piece, forwards, which wove in and out of the backwards recording: singing a love song to my niece and birthing myself in reverse. This video is me performing with that temporally layered recording, live.