Speaking as a VERY queer pro-law and order capitalist here, who once identified as trans and very much thinks the western world is the best place to be gay anywhere on Earth, I could get down with "Be Gay Do Crime" as a slogan somewhere like Russia, Saudi Arabia, China, etc. If the US penalized gayness with prison time and I hadn't been able to get prep myself when something happened to me from the Gilead program (WOW that stuff is prohibitively expensive, thanks insurance racket, Pharma, and CDC/FDA regulations making it impossible to get low cost meds out!), I'd be right there with ya.
It's so rough with the gay community and minorities especially, higher rates of deadly STD exposure, probably going to be higher now that California has basically made it legal to knowingly give someone HIV, changing the prison term to 6 months and the charge to a misdemeanor. Granted, prison where the disease spreads like wildfire due to a certain kind of mistreatment of gays there is probably the worst place to have HIV infected individuals, if you don't like HIV spreading.
Then you have countries like Russia that have made it illegal for people in the US to adopt their orphaned children -- which there is an epidemic -- just because we've legalized gay marriage, and they have anti-gay propaganda laws. I was and still am a huge fan of T.a.T.u for daring to make a whole music video in the 90's of two chicks making out, and perform here with a shirt that had to be censored from Хуй войне meaning Fuck War to Жуй войне meaning Chew to the war live. To save their careers I'm pretty sure when the group broke up they both had to pretend it was gay propaganda and they have somehow reformed their ways. Though Yulia to this day maintains she loves Lena, and the tension between Lena's religious upbringing and confession and Yulia's bisexuality was palpable in their interviews, even if Lena may have had to play it up to keep from attracting negative attention from the Russian government.
Anyway gay counter culture has always been a big part of my life. It's only recently I became so disillusioned with the left for telling us gays how to think, like we don't check enough oppression boxes to say we don't like the idea of forcing everyone to go to workplace trainings to tell them how to treat us. To me, being gay shouldn't make us more special than anyone else, and I had constantly this ... stubborn feeling the left were always going back and forth between patronizing us only to ignore our needs, claiming we have to stand together, and then bashing down anyone who doesn't 100% agree with doxxing people for thought crime and burning down ironically majority minority communities... Or preferential racial favoritism, replacing one supremacy with another, etc., etc. The feeling that after so many people, I -- and the larger gay community, would be next. Like what happened to the TERFs, trans-exclusionary radical feminists, who are on board with everything until you get up to trans females.
All that said I think you've made something really interesting.
I think probably the strongest section is your outro. This is where I get the most sense of motion and clarity. The rest of the piece, as you can hear by the reverb on the end, is overcome with a lot of sustained harmonics picked up by the verb. Wherever you have reverb, I would turn it down by as much as half or 75% on the wet signal, and low cut said wet signal as much as 250hz. These frequencies sound nice on a solo instrument, but across the whole mix and in an ensemble create a smokescreen around all those beautiful cinematic sounds I felt you wanted to cut through the mix. A clean sound makes a statement.
The piece is quite repetitive, though I sense you're pointing out the ongoing struggle you feel yourself facing. I think now that I relisten that part of the problem may be the cinematic bass drums having so much verb to them naturally. There's a plugin called ERA-R which can be used over top of samples if you find no way to otherwise divorce them from it. Sidechain could be applied here if it has not already, lightly, or KSHMR Essentials Kick for quick emphasis of transients and compression. The free version of this plugin worked wonders for me even with less than stellar drum machine emulators.
There is quite a lot of unresolved tension, which of course was intentional. Beyond wanting perhaps a couple more laid back sections peeling back the layers, that's all I could ask. Otherwise, kept me interested until the very last second, just on the knife edge and still wanting more.
Great work. I really enjoyed the listen. Thanks for coming out to NGUAC!
Also how do you pronounce your name again?
