Connective Tissue is about the spaces between sound, ideas and people. Featuring underground artists from across the electronic spectrum as well as themed excursions into rhythms at large, Kathi delves into dance music, as well as into the connections that make it possible. The party hiatus forced by the pandemic prompted a personal need to reevaluate what DJing can do as an inherently contextual, fluid, and community-based practice, within and beyond nightlife. Connective Tissue seeks to explore this question through conversations, guest contributions, and experimentation with the 2-hour radio format. Sonic syncretism, fluidity, and genre irreverence will be celebrated in every episode.

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This month’s guest mix for Connective Tissue was put together by Melissa Guion aka MJ Guider, a musician/producer, radio DJ, and artist based in New Orleans. Her album, Sour Cherry Bell, came out on Kranky last year and is one of my favorite releases to emerge out of the pandemic. I met Melissa when I lived in New Orleans and we both had radio shows at WTUL 91.5 fm. Her show, Night Gallery, continues to air every Friday from 8-10pm. Her latest 2-track release Matanzas is out now on bandcamp. You can read more about Melissa’s intention behind the release and her guest mix below.

One of the goals of Connective Tissue is to bring more collaboration into the traditional radio show <> guest contributor dynamic. Thinking about commonalities that might inspire a theme for this episode, I remembered that Melissa is part Cuban and that back in 2017 she was planning a trip to Cuba with her mom, who had not been back to the island in fifty years. At that time I was teaching Spanish at Tulane and she approached me about taking lessons with the goal to improve her Spanish enough to be able to have some deeper conversations with her abuela. I moved to Los Angeles later that year and had not reconnected with Melissa until recently.. As it turns out she had just finished two tracks that were about “reckoning with the experience” of that trip to Cuba, and was getting ready to release them as Matanzas, named after the province in Northern Cuba.

In the email exchange that followed we realized that we were both exploring different and new ways to make sense of our fragmented/ partial Latin American backgrounds, her as the daughter of Cuban immigrants but born and raised in New Orleans, me born in Nicaragua to a Nicaraguan mother and German father and growing up bilingually all over world. Despite discourse around the “ni de aquí, ni de allá” experience of bicultural people in the US, binaries and fixed definitions tend to dominate most mainstream conversations and even more fluid ones as well. It has made me curious how artists of multiple backgrounds are exploring duality in 2021, especially in (sometimes subtle) ways that don’t neatly fit into a representational category and in scenes/ genres that are mostly white/ anglo or have been white-washed.

The first hour of the show is influenced by my everyday, almost banal, portal-like experience of hearing music in Spanish in Los Angeles. The Juan Gabriel song that comes on in a rideshare, or cumbia blasting from a passing car, or your neighbors playing salsa at their Sunday cookout. Often I know the words to the older songs, my mom having played many of these classics relentlessly at home or at family gatherings. The exposure to this music is coincidental and fleeting. The emotions and memories it triggers usually come by surprise and leave a long-lasting effect. It’s an experience that defies functionality, trends, and linear time, and as mundane as it seems, it can transport the listener to other eras and places while inhabiting the physical space of the city. It’s “de aquí Y de allá.”

In my email exchange with Melissa, I explained that these “portals” were the inspiration for my mix, and an attempt to connect this recurring experience to DJing, and she replied the following:

these things come to you that are familiar and they stir a specific nostalgia because for you these memories exist and you have a sense of place and time about them, but I go in search of these things and they don’t mean anything to me explicitly, having had this kind of fragmented exposure, until I can line them up against this kind of slippery sense of placelessness.

Wanting to know more about Melissa’s process exploring this “sense of placelessness” and how it relates to Matanzas and her guest mix for Connective Tissue, we expanded our conversation in the interview below.

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Q: In our email exchange leading up to this episode, you mentioned that you usually do not include much context around your music. For Matanzas, you decided to have liner notes explaining the process leading up to the music. Why was it different with this release?

A: It’s not really my preference to have a lot of explanation out in front of something I made. I personally like the experience of approaching something before knowing everything (or anything) about it, as much as that’s possible. But there have been times where context does set things up in a way that I appreciate. For Matanzas there are some things about the source material and the process of making and re-making it that, to me, are as much a part of the thing as what it sounds like. So it felt right to tell the story a bit. It was definitely a challenge, and a little uncomfortable!

Q: I’m interested in how people invent a language to understand their connection to a certain lineage or cultural trace, often to “translate” the experience back to themselves, much like you mentioned doing for Matanzas. Can you talk a little about what that translation process was like, what tools did you use, literally and/or figuratively?

A: Most literally my Cuban translation routine is with the language. I grew up speaking Spanish but my real fluency cut off at the point that I started at a school where no-one was speaking it with me every day. So there are some gaps in my comprehension and I’m always filling them in with whatever context is available. The other side of it is that loose connection to the culture. Recently I was having a conversation with someone who has had a similar experience being from a Mexican family and living in Texas, where growing up as an American kid loomed larger than the connection to Mexico. They called it “culture dysmorphia.” I related to that, and the idea that it’s this feeling of unease in between two worlds.

The translation process for Matanzas happened because what I wanted from the documentation I’d made was to discover something I didn’t know, that spoke to me in a familiar language. In the recordings what I heard was…what I heard the first time, and all the insufficiency I brought with me. So I dissected and warped and twisted the sounds around until something clicked. Same with the photos I used throughout the artwork. I had brought an instant camera on the trip with one pack of film. 8 chances to perfectly capture the experience. By the time I was “done” with the music, those photos didn’t match where I’d wound up. The images needed translating too, like how the Bacunayagua Bridge into Matanzas on the cover doesn’t stand alone – it’s obfuscated to a degree by the record itself. Nothing taken at face value.

Q: Tell us a bit about the mix!

A: For the mix I wanted to put together something that reflected the spirit of Matanzas. Something ni aquí ni allá. It’s a bit of the Latin America I know from a place of removal by some degrees or distance, some newer music that makes a good soundtrack for the proverbial journey of this thing, some noise and field recordings…it’s not a perfect document but it’s the one that fits. This also officially marks the first time I’m putting one of my own songs in a mix. Seems like the moment to do it if there ever was one.

Q: How are you feeling coming out of the pandemic and what’s on the horizon for 2021 and beyond?

A: I’m not sure how I feel! Balancing the positives / gratitude for the good fortune of being able to finally hug my family and spend time with friends, with the reality that a lot of people are still struggling with the pandemic much worse than we are. My hope for what’s to come is to get a good flow of energy going to work on new projects, start some collaborations, make the next record, create and funnel interesting work through the new modemain imprint…possibly even play some shows or take a vacation. Hey, maybe I’ll see you in L.A. :)