SELF/WORK (2019/2024)

Limited edition cassette with and-embossed cover and lavender, clary sage, and sandalwood incense vial.

SELF/WORK is currently available for pre-order. The moment the album is released you’ll get unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus a high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.

digital album releases July 9, 2024

item ships out on or around July 5, 2024

edition of 50

SELF/WORK entertains notions of labor, power, and authority in matters of physical, emotional, and spiritual healing. Set in a dystopian retreat center, it is engaged with doctor and charlatan, placebo and medicine, and phenomena of healing that are better explained by metaphysics than by hard science.

Anastasia Clarke (who now performs under their nascent stage moniker, AC Diamond) composed SELF/WORK in 2018 for their master’s thesis at Mills College. The demi-theatrical piece is set in a dystopian retreat center where healer and patient engage in a battle of wills modeled on a Jungian concept of countertransference, as described through texts of the homeopath Edward C. Whitmont in Psyche and Soma: The Alchemy of Healing. The original performance features heavily around a sprawling hybrid instrument-controller based on Michel Waisvisz’s cracklebox circuit, with two performers embodying ‘healer’ and ‘patient’ archetypes to interact with copper ‘cracklepads’ that unfold the work’s sound design. Versioned in this release as an audio drama, Clarke performs all voice parts and has added the use of the Buchla 200-E modular system at Elektronmusikstudion, Stockholm.

There will be a release show on July 9, 2024 at 222 Bowery, New York NY, aka the Giorno Poetry Systems headquarters, presented by Soap Library. More information: giornopoetrysystems.org/222-bowery/events/soap-library

credits

Composed and performed by Anastasia Clarke
Recorded and engineered by Anastasia Clarke at Mills College, 2018 and Elektronmusikstudion (EMS), Stockholm, 2019 as Artist-in-Residence
Mixed and mastered by Jonah Rosenberg at Blueberry Farms Studio, Brooklyn, 2023
Artwork by Kit Mills
Text by Anastasia Clarke, Edward C. Whitmont, Jen Gerry
Layout + Product Shots by J. Campolo
Project Management by Kerry Santullo
2024

Special Thanks: Jen Gerry, Laetitia Sonami, and Zeena Parkins for their guidance and involvement in the creation of this work.