At the end of 2015, Gavilán Rayna Russom — the transdisciplinary artist is best known as the lead synthesist in LCD Soundsystem — began a “rigorous deep dive” into what was truly meaningful to her. After two decades as a fixture in the New York City club scene and releasing music as Black Meteoric Star and Paper Eyes, she was taking some time off for “self care.” This internal journey led Rayna back to her childhood love for science fiction and fantasy, as she began to realize how these fictional stories could act as allegories for her trans identity. “Science fiction is permission and empowerment to not fit into conventional social norms,” she tells them. “It’s a model for people who do that and have full lives.”
As she looked to make a new project to mark her official name change, one book in particular persisted in Rayna's head: Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness. She became consumed by the author’s depiction of sexuality in her seminal 1969 science fiction novel, which centers on a world called Gethen inhabited by people who are usually gender-neutral, except for once a month, when they go into a state called kemmer and become designated male or female. As a result, her new album The Envoy (out now via Ecstatic) became an exploration of fluidity and space, with the names of its spellbinding synth compositions inspired by phrases from the book.
To speak with Rayna about The Envoy, I enlisted science fiction author Charlie Jane Anders (City in the Middle of the Night, All the Birds in the Sky), who wrote the official afterword to the 50th anniversary edition of The Left Hand of Darkness. Together, they chatted about being “trans weirdos,” finding community, and how Le Guin’s work is connected, in a sense, to Prince.
The Envoy is inspired by Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness. For example, the track “Kemmer” is a direct reference to a term in the book. How did you tie in narrative ideas from the book into the album?
Gavilán Rayna Russom: [The Left Hand of Darkness] is so dense. In the book, [Le Guin is] describing places, people, and experiences with this incredible level of detail. It reminds me of when in poetry, the writer tries to just get the shape of an energy and a moment. That book is full of all of these charged up moments. I ingested all of it. Then as I approached making the [musical] pieces, it came out in these different ways.
Charlie Jane Anders: Yeah, I've read Left Hand of Darkness like four, maybe five times now. I always get new things from it. There's so much stuff in it, like the Gethenian folklore, all of their spirituality and practices. People talk about it as being a transgender book, and it's definitely not a transgender book — nobody in that book is transgender. It is a book that does fuck with your sense of gender and what it means to be male or female. Le Guin invents these Gethenian people who don't have a gender identity, like nine-tenths of the time. Then one-tenth of the time, they have a gender identity that's situational. It’s a thought experiment. It makes you realize how random and arbitrary a lot of stuff about gender in the real world is. You can write about people who [aren’t bound by gender essentialism] and they can still feel like people, and that's a really cool thing.
GRR: [The Left Hand of Darkness] very carefully and fully proposes a radically different idea about gender that seems totally feasible. One of my favorite moments in Left Hand of Darkness is when it describes this divination ritual...
CJA: Oh yeah, it's fucking weird. Sexuality and spirituality are all wrapped up together. [The characters experience] a sexual frenzy that puts them into a spiritual zone. It's like the Lovesexy album by Prince. [laughs]
GRR: [laughs] That’s exactly it. That scene, before I even read it, is quite similar to things I'm trying to evoke musically. There’s all these things about music and healing that I discovered intuitively as a kid. Like, the fact that a certain type of harmonic density creates this virtual space that I get to be in. It's spiritual. The part of Kemmer that I relate to is, when I’m dancing to or creating music, certain sounds and frequencies seem to bring forward feminine sensations in my body, while others seem to bring forward masculine sensations in my body. There is this power in music to create liminal zones, like at nighttime, when the edges of things soften.
On a larger scale, how has science fiction and Le Guin’s work in particular impacted your life?
GRR: As I was trying to navigate not fitting in and being gendered as feminine often [while growing up], comics became like a way sort of being cool, but also be in my fantasy zone. X-Men comics are where it all took off for me. I acted like I wanted to be Wolverine, but I really wanted to be Storm. Then, it fell away as I started to move towards music and experimental cinema as ways of inhabiting other worlds that weren’t tied to narrative or specific details. Then, a few years ago, reading sci-fi just came back into my life like a vengeance. My sister gave me Mind of my Mind by Octavia Butler for Christmas, and then it was on. It was like that little kid who loved reading sci-fi came back. Octavia Butler and Ursula Le Guin was new information for me that I was so excited to learn about.
CJA: I've always found science fiction mind expanding, for lack of a better term. Ursula Le Guin talks a lot in her essays and speeches about how things don't have to be the way that they are. That kind of thought experiment is really liberating and empowering. When I was trying to find my way as a person and as a writer, I kept getting drawn back to that idea of science fiction as a way to imagine myself in a way that wasn't tied down to all these weird limits that people want to put on you all the time. I was reading a lot of really weird shit [like Philip K. Dick, Thomas Disch, Samuel Delany, Deborah Ross, and Phillip José Farmer] and thought, “This makes sense to me in a way that real life doesn't.”
I'm trans. And I'm also a weirdo. Me being trans and me being a weirdo are two different aspects of my identity that aren't dependent on each other, but they feed into each other. Science fiction helps me to be okay with being a weirdo. That, in turn, freed me up to experiment with my gender presentation.
GRR: I literally use that exact phrasing in my mind so many times.
There’s this trope throughout science fiction and in Charlie's work, where characters who are able to flourish when they arrive in places that actually allows them to harness their powers. How has spaces in the real world helped you foster your sense of identity and ownership of self?
CJA: That's something that I've continued to try to get at in my work: What does it mean to have a community? What are the costs to be part of a community? What do you have to give up in order to be part of a community that nurtures you, but also expects stuff from you or puts expectations on you about who you're going to be? That's something that I definitely relate to personally as a queer trans creator. Previously, I was on my own trying to figure this stuff out. But coming to San Francisco and getting to be part of a bunch of different scenes — including some queer, trans, poly, other sex positive communities, as well as the science fiction literary scene — that was incredibly transformative for me. I think that our identities are created through and with other people. Getting to see yourself reflected back at yourself by people who get you is a "power up" in a way.
GRR: I've had a tremendous amount of difficulty in my life finding community, but I really crave it. One of the ways that I've mediated that is through creativity, particularly music making. Up until this day, [my music has] a sort of spatial, experiential quality, as if you're entering a space when a piece starts. By using sound to create a space, my liabilities become powers, and the person that I am can flourish. Initially, it was for myself, doing that as a way to heal. But a big thing for me now is the spell casting of being a DJ. All my experiences of being a lonely, weird kid led to this very heightened sensitivity in something like performing live or DJing. In the club space, there’s fluidity and a dissolution of certain conventional norms, and I have the job providing the audio accompaniment for this very complex experience.
Interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Get the best of what's queer. Sign up for our weekly newsletter here.
.jpg)
