Composer and vocalist Holland Andrews shares an improvisational score and performance. The work encompasses ancestral wisdom for dismantling negative internalized belief systems to create greater potential for magic and radical futures. While drawing parallels between the shared phenomena of the gift of clairaudience in their lineage, Andrews also draws parallels to fascist powers destroying the planet and how they mirror the destruction of collective and individual self-empowerment. This piece is an invitation to allow the voices of ancestors and unseen forces to shed light on how to be agents of emergent transformation inside ourselves to impact the world around us.
From the artist:
In the process of connecting to my mother’s spirit to gain more wisdom around our paralleled and divergent experiences of hearing voices, I was compelled to integrate the legacy of seers, healers, oracles, and revolutionaries along our bloodlines to be a radical force of transformational emergence. This improvisational score and spell is a tool to spiritually and emotionally immolate all internal oppressive belief systems— systems that stem from the same maligned forces that poison our, water, land, commit mass atrocities, and ultimately attempt to disempower us as a collective. I also reckon with the reality of being resistant to the beauty of this change due to tendrils of colonization’s cunning way of convincing us that it is more powerful than us; the biggest lie we have ever been told.
These changes happen from a deep internal place first, but when our bodies can no longer contain them, they must spill out onto the world around us. The deepest form of touch being vibration, I utilized in this work through humming, channeled singing, soundscape creation, vocal toning and ambient drones. With these vessels I desire to expose the infinite overlay of possibilities and potential for the magical redesign of our energy networks, and align them with the our bravest, most radical loving futures.
Holland Andrews (they/them) is a vocalist, composer, producer, and performer whose work focuses on the abstraction of operatic and extended-technique voice to build cathartic and dissonant soundscapes. Andrews arranges music for voice, clarinet, and electronics and frequently highlights themes surrounding vulnerability and healing. Andrews harnesses these instruments’ innate qualities of power and elegance to serve as a cohesive vessel for these themes. As a vocalist, their influences stem from a dynamic range including contemporary opera, theater, and jazz, while also cultivating their own unique vocal style which integrates these influences with language disintegration, vocal distortion, and environmental ambience. Andrews previously performed solo music under the stage name Like a Villain.
In addition to creating solo work, Andrews composes and performs for dance, theater, and film, and their work is toured nationally and internationally with artists such as Bill T. Jones, Dorothee Munyaneza, Will Rawls, Sonya Tayeh, Jenn Freeman, and poet Demian Dinéyazhi. Notable musical collaborations include Son Lux, Nils Frahm, Christina Vantzou, William Brittelle, Methods Body, West Thordson, Darian Donovan Thomas, and eddy kwon.
Their previous work also includes composing film scores for Rebeca Huntt’s BEBA (nominated for an Independent Spirit Award and acquired by Neon and Onyx Collective/Hulu) and Sophie Compton and Reuben Hamlyn’s Another Body (awarded SXSW 2023 Documentary Feature Special Jury Award for Innovation in Storytelling). Andrews has gained recognition from publications such as The Wire, The New York Times, Vogue, Le Monde, and BBC Radio. Holland Andrews is currently based in Brooklyn, New York.
