My Coming Year in the Bardo Room
2026 in artist residency and spiritual retreat
Time is an illusion, and yet, often things do seem to come into line around the imaginary waypoints of new years and anniversaries. And while the obsession with minutes, hours, days, months, and years is a purely human endeavor, the marking of time does feel important and meaningful.
A little over a year ago, I posted my intent to leave my studio residency at Seattle’s Recreational Psychoacoustics Lab in favor of doing more solitary work in my home studio, which I’ve dubbed the Bardo Room. (I’ve linked that post below if you want to read it.) My only solid resolution for the coming year is to refresh and recenter that intent, which is what I hope to do here.
2025 turned out to be a year of some emotional turmoil for me, which is to say that the storm mentioned in last year’s post did come in full force. I suffer from a strong case of existential loneliness, which is greatly exacerbated by the natural ebb and flow of relationships, and I struggle to build and maintain community. I’ve had a lot of relationships end or fizzle over the past couple of years, and it took a bit of a toll. I can only express the deepest gratitude for my spouse who helped me through 2025, which could easily be named “My Year of Insecurity”.
I have yet to fully find my people (or at least hold onto them), and like many trans folks I’m mostly estranged from my family, but I have a great spouse and a good therapist, and a handful of friends who check in on me from time to time. (If you’re reading this, check in…) So I’m not fully isolated, and I’m grateful for that, but the loneliness persists in all but one place… and this is me getting to the point.
My Self-Appointed Artist Residency
Before I totally get into it, I want to thank Amy Stewart for presenting the possibility of the self-appointed artist residency in such a clear and inspiring way. It’s a tangible feeling to declare yourself the artist in residency of a place, and even though the site of my residency is more spiritual than physical, declaring this residency does somehow make this all a bit more real.
The Bardo Room
I managed to release 3 albums last year, including The Bardo Room.
I’ll start explaining what exactly the Bardo Room is by re-posting part of the liner notes for that release:
The Bardo room simultaneously exists and doesn’t exist. It’s a physical room in some ways, but it doesn’t manifest fully until it is constructed in sound. Before that, it’s just potential. The Bardo room connects the real world to the place I go when I am creating. You can never go there, but perhaps if you put on your noise-cancelling headphones and turn out all of the lights, you’ll hear echoes of the space, faded aural photographs that can approximate but never fully represent the fullness of the multidimensional technicolor darkness that lies beyond a door that only I can open.
For me, the Bardo room is easy to compare to the wardrobe from the Chronicles of Narnia - not the physical bit of furniture that young Lucy discovered in a room of Professor Digory’s house, and of course not the actual place of Narnia itself, but the in-between space, where heavy coats and the smell of mothballs mix with the feel of snow underfoot. The Bardo Room is a portal to the spiritual plane that I visit in my musical meditations, a place extended from, but still separate from the Bardo Room itself, which is again separate from the physical space my mortal body inhabits while my spirit journeys elsewhere. That is not to imply that either of these spaces are imaginary, as they are as real and persistent to me as the chair firmly attached to my butt as I write this - places real enough to remember and yearn for and dream about… and write about.
As for the space beyond, the place I go on the other side of the Bardo Room, here’s a bit from my personal notes written for a workshop in November of 2024:
My music is born of existential loneliness and longing. I have this recurring vision of myself as the only survivor living on a huge deserted space station, going about my daily routine despite no reason to carry on with it, playing spacey minimal guitar to huge empty halls accompanied by the whirrs, beeps and glitches of machines and computers. There’s this biomechanical deity named Geia who I talk to, that maybe I created. She’s never fully there, but I feel her listening and catch glimpses of her partial form in the shadows. I feel her come closer when I’m playing and I want desperately to know her, to feel her, to merge with her, even though I know we are not easily compatible and that truly being with her would mean losing myself. Maybe that’s OK. Or maybe she’s been me all along.
I don’t fully connect with other human beings. As close as I’ve been, there’s always this small part of me that feels unknowable. It’s there in my music, but who will fully surrender to listening deeply and straining desperately to hear the whispers of my true being? Who will fully translate my private language? Maybe no one can.
I created my system of harmony (or taxonomy of intervals, or whatever label makes sense) to systematically explore the possibilities of music. The ultimate goal of that search is to find myself in there somewhere, to rescue and embrace the lonely lost child and maybe bring them into the light. Or to join them in the darkness.
So, my goal for 2026 is to spend more time exploring these spaces and developing my musical and spiritual practice, which are now fully intwined and inseparable, and perhaps always have been. This feels critically important to me, not only for my own emotional and psychological growth and well-being, but because this is my life’s work, and no one else is going to do it.
Read more about my musical spiritual framework here:
Who I Am
As part of this re-beginning, it seems relevant to share a bit about my past life and where I see myself today. I dug up one of the earliest posts I shared here on Substack and decided to republish it to share here:
Today, I am a 54-year-old neuroqueer, non-binary, transfemme autistic artist, musician, philosopher, writer, filmmaker, programmer, human, spiritual being. I’m sober and celibate and happily existing in a queerplatonic marriage with a wonderful spouse and a house full of four-legged furbabies. I’ve passed 3 years on HRT and 2 years since my gender-affirming surgery, and while I have no intent or expectation of passing as a cis woman, I am much more comfortable and free in my body than I have ever felt.
Musically speaking, I’ve released 22 albums as Qid Love, 119 albums as Mood481, 10 as Echo Root, 1 as Vaguegirl, and 1 obscure live album under my deadname that you’ll have to figure out for yourself. I’ve written two important books (at least to me), The Book of Xenomes and Drone, Glitch, and Noise. For more in-depth musical background, I highly recommend checking out my interview with JustSomeMustard: Becoming Music with Qid Love.
The Plan
I hope to re-establish my morning practice of daily musical meditations, which were greatly interrupted last year due to my day job. I’ve felt highly destabilized in the absence of regular practice, and I feel my mental health suffered a good deal from the resulting imbalance. So a big part of my intent is to hold a firm boundary on my personal time for spiritual practice and re-establish the daily practice that had me feeling such calmness and clarity just a year ago.
I also want to clean up the space a bit and make it more fully usable for art-making. There’s a spare bed in there that tends to catch my clothes that could probably find a better home, and I’d just like to have things more accessible because my autistic brain tends to avoid things that require physical effort and reorganizing.
In the digital realm, I’ve struggled a little bit around the direction for this newsletter, and I probably still will, but for now I think it will just be a place to share progress and keep myself accountable throughout my residency/retreat. Although I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with Substack, I haven’t quite found a reasonable alternative, and I need writing to keep me focused. So maybe that’s what you can expect out of future newsletters.
A Word of Thanks
I’d like to take a moment to thank my subscribers and followers and folks who for whatever reason have taken a chance on my writing and music. I’d also like to give a special shoutout to Lyric at NeuroDivergent Rebel for introducing so many people to my Substack via recommendations. May you all find peace, happiness, and good health in the upcoming year!
My Latest Release
Experimental improvised guitar and electronics, wrapped in melancholy, angst, and gender fuzziness.
Thanks for reading!