JR: We are so different from one another.
YR: This is true!
JHR: It shows up all the time. I really enjoy this about us. The back and forth can feel combative, but it’s also playful, like a twin flame. I made a joke the other day about how austere you come off, and how I’m the only friend in our circle that really be messing with you, maybe it’s middle child antics, but there seems to be an inverting that happens when we DJ, or at least that strictness is unbound, you can be wild and uninhibited on the decks.
YR: Girl, you are so good at being annoying! [YR rolls eyes]
Our playfulness is dear to me, for real. I don’t have close siblings, so this relationship gives me a chance to explore a side of myself I wasn’t able to. I am strict, though. And because I’m so obsessed with discipline, I think I’m also just as attracted to abandon. When I was really young, my stepdad got a black box to watch pay-per-view boxing matches, so we had illegal cable, and I was watching so many things I wasn’t allowed to without anyone ever knowing. So this brushing up against order always felt like a fertile space of possibility and creation for me. I think growing up the way I did in Miami inspired a particular interest in the emotional and artistic density that exists between things: it’s a kind of a compositional method for how I understand art and music, it’s a way of thinking that attends not to comprehending things in fixed terms, because everything is deeply implicated, but instead deploys more informal and lit ways of composing and recomposing what is given. I see it in everything I do, especially DJing.
JHR: Your writing and video work are also trying to explore this space between critique, analysis, sound, and poetry. It makes sense.
YR: I think film can serve as a mode of inquiry. I’m currently experimenting with assembling found and original footage across their own and other narrative dimensions, similar to what I do during a DJ set, honestly. At the root of it, there’s always an attempt at reordering the relationship between time and history that I keep coming back to—which is absolutely musical, and we need poetry to get there, too. And I’ve been writing a lot. I’m excited about where that’s going.
I also totally embrace the side of me that loves to be calculated. It’s like building a house or something. A really fab house. I will always try to gag you during a set, but 7 times out of 10, I will have planned at least some of the gag, you know what I mean? Which makes the surprise that much sweeter to me when I hear people scream, or sometimes I get this look—someone will look at me like I’m in trouble. Like I got away with something. I LIVE for these moments because they totally exceed language.
JHR: Yesss.
YR: Then there’s the ‘wildness’ you mentioned, and that’s just the way my mind works. That’s when I try to rewrite the floor plan of the blend, use an FX in a way it isn’t supposed to be used. I obsess over what certain things on the mixer can do, and try to work them against each other to find new ways of painting the mix. When it works, it’ll open up a bunch of other possibilities I need to explore and try.
I was talking to Yacine about this recently during a studio visit. She asked me about playing with 2 CDJS versus 4, and I was like, “I need four tongues to say what I need to say.”
JHR: This is relatable—it reminds me of an interview with Toni Morrison, where she talks about all the work that goes into improvisation so “that it appears that you’ve never touched it.” This kind of discipline is essential to the invisible labor that comes before a major set or anything public-facing for me. In the same sentence, she says Black art “must have the ability to use found objects, the appearance of using found things”, and I’m always thinking about tracks and how they function in a similar sense as found objects. My Sustain set is a good example of this.
YR: The gym was vibrating. I’m happy I was there for that. We both do a similar motion towards building scale and drama in a set in our own ways, but what goes into this for you?
JHR: I have this folder called ‘upward spiral-cyclonic exaltation’ where I’ve collected tracks that have a similar momentum to some sculptures I’ve been working on. It’s about the high end of a blend, creating a vertical omnidirectional motion. In contrast, the low end feels very planted and bodily. Your legs are moving differently in relation to your upper body. You know how sea grass moves underwater? Kind of like that.
YR: So there’s an aesthetic register for some kind of image before you play?
JHR: Yeah, or maybe ‘climate’ is a better word. There’s like an arc or a journey that needs to be experienced.
YR: When you say ‘climate,’ I think of video games and how they’ve played a fundamental role in how you see things. Let’s wake that up. I’ve noticed the influence in your sound and sculpture.
JHR: You know…I feared you’d wake up the ‘gamer.’ For one, I’m not sure if I actually even want to come out of that closet.
YR: Please. You were fierce in the comments.
JHR: Tea, I just wish somebody had my back because these incels want to argue.
YR: You kind of ate them up, honestly. That’s what inspired this question.
JHR: I have a fierce obsession with beautifully rendered worlds that are open to exploration. Growing up, I spent a lot of time exploring the playable bounds, where you run up against an invisible wall. And in some, my little brother and I would figure out ways to get outside of this invisible wall through a glitch. It’s nicknamed out of bounds (OOB), outside the intended playable map. And there is something to this and how I think about art making, or my practice at large, where I’m up against walls and I have to finesse my way through. After pushing through the OOB, we’d be met with the doom of an unrendered world. That sounds so dramatic, especially because it was typically underwhelming. Nevertheless, I love the drama of it all.
I’m now more interested in making my own video game, where I get to decide where something ends and begins. DJing is similar: you have so much control, but have to negotiate so that there are actually people sharing in the experience with you.
YR: Never-ending negotiations. What about fashion? We’re both always thinking about design, but how do games inspire your personal style?
JHR: Where I really got my jush was modifying my character’s appearance. Which is what I was being fierce about in the comments. There were never any fab clothes; it’s always so disappointing. I come from humble-ass beginnings, so clothing was not something we got to indulge in as much.
YR: Same. But my Mom’s style was always sickening somehow, definitely an inspiration to me. She’d have on like 70s style-oversized blue sunglasses, a neon green bikini top, ripped up Polo shorts, and white boots.
JHR: We had access to video games because my mom would splurge on us once a year with her tax return. Final Fantasy, The Sims Urbz, and even Skyrim played a huge role in how I approach my fashioning. I’d like to think that my Fidan Novruzova mules give me +7 Charisma, my Rick Owens ruched top gives me +10 Stealth, vintage Prada chain belt boosts my luck up to 20 stat points. The way I’ve conceived my style directly correlates to how these games cemented the belief in me that what I wear could protect me to some extent.
YR: You’re funny [YR smiles].
When we came up for your thesis show, I remember seeing the floor piece and realizing it was the largest scale I’ve seen you work in.
JHR: As I was developing that ‘Nowadays’ floor piece, I was thinking about this connection to the site and sound system. How sound systems can create a site and a sort of temporality that really challenges the act of archiving.
How do you feel about site specificity and geopins in general, but also how it relates to this idea of ‘site’?
YR: When I think about site specificity, I’m also thinking about the word ‘situation.’ I remember being in middle school, reading essays on Ana Mendieta in an art journal and noticing a lot of her titles had the words ‘in situ’ in them. At the time, I didn’t know what that meant. I assumed it was just short for ‘situation.’ So I was like, hold on…all this work I’m looking at must be predicated on a moment unique to its own situation. Suspended ‘in situ.’ Then I learned it was the Latin phrase for “existing in its original place,” but I lean more towards my initial misinterpretation because I think there’s more to a site than where it exists (originally or not) on a map.
JHR: I’ve always had an aversion to site-specificity because it often seeks to dictate where something ends and begins. It doesn’t really work that way. Jaqui M. Alexander has a really great way of thinking about people in diaspora, she asks us to think specifically about the position of being “African American and exiled on the spot where one is born. To be Caribbean and exiled on foreign soil, producing a longing so deep that the site of neglect is reminiscent of beauty,” which brings me back to this question; if this is fundamentally how one arrives at a site, is there a reparative effort in its continued relocation? In many ways, this is the question throughout my practice as an artist.
YR: Right. I’m not really interested, nor do I believe in a totalitizing reparative project. To do so would be to believe in something that could, for all practical purposes, eclipse the violence that has taken place to every Black and Indigenous person and their territories. At the same time, it’s like, is the impossibility of return or repair necessarily a defeat? This is a starting point for a lot of my work. Fleeing as well as staying are all entangled with what it means to fight, you know?
JHR: Hmm, I really appreciate that…the disbelief in a reparative act, because it is working from an impossibility, which to me feels generative. I think this also brings up another relationship I’ve been working through between movement and its capture.
YR: Makes me think of your earlier models of the mangroves—they have an innovative way of navigating adaptability, no matter what elements or landscapes they need to exist with or against. I think what you’re doing is also a kind of study in change.
JHR: I’m glad you brought up the mangrove. To me, they look like hands. Imagine a long exposure of hands operating the CDJs, their movements stacked on top of each other to make some sort of rhizome. I’ve also been thinking of mangroves as holding apparatuses that can be fashioned similarly to hands, with rings and nails. The mangrove becomes a type of communal embodiment.
When you mention ‘study of change,’ I have to say, long exposure is key in my performance work. I use the strobe to reveal and disappear what’s happening in front of the audience, kind of like the stroke of the shutter. And in new work, most recently the ‘Nowadays’ floor piece, I’m trying to image something that is arguably uncapturable.
This sets up a lot of new questions for me. I’m interested in what makes people move, what agents are at play that embolden people to move en masse, whether it be on a dancefloor or in a larger diasporic context. What are the technologies at play? Who employs them? What is recontextualized in dance music? Sampling?
YR: Yeah. For me, right now, it is really important to work with ideas that don’t fit an anthropological or historical narrative. Neither do they make sense with the modern nor negate it. I’m really curious about the impossibilities that emerge when language and image are forced to make sense of each other. Even in music, we force reason on things that belong to a realm of freedom. The video work I’m making with Kai (WILDBLUR) tries to unsettle these kinds of expectations.
JHR: Period.
Before I get to this question, I’d like to gently correct Nile Harris, who in the script for his BOFFO performance incorrectly defined ‘Quiva’ as Queer and Diva combined. The correct definition comes from a summation of QUEEN and DIVA; this term was coined and created by the beloved Ley (Lysis). A group of Quivas is addressed as a ‘QUIVER’, the past tense verb is ‘quiva’d’.
YR: Let them know.
JHR: Language plays a massive role in nightlife. There’s always an emergent queer NYC vernacular at play, one of which is so stupid, but also quite fabulous.
YR: I think it’s brilliant, honestly. Relating to each other in cryptic, seemingly imperceptible ways is so important and precious to us in New York City. Life can feel wretched as hell sometimes, then you get a text from a friend...and the “my life is shit” rage is over, at least for a few hours, you’re laughing again. Life is livable again.
JHR: Yesness.
YR: [YR laughs] I love this. I do this with Dylan (Via App) all the time…we literally stitch a new phrase or word that’s specific to the moment, that addresses and reframes whatever is happening to us in a way that makes it less edgy, many times more absurd, and just easier to deal with. I mean, there’s something really profound about taking English apart, questioning its integrity, reconfiguring its parts.
JHR: I think this is a perfect segue to tie in something we’ve talked about before, this idea of creating worlds within a weekend that offer…an alternative way of relation. You know?
There’s that term Luis Manuel Garcia-Mispireta coined in Together Somehow, ‘liquidarity,’ basically a feeling of belonging, predicated on maintaining shallow connections where what I really think ends up happening is people’s politics remain anonymous. That’s definitely not what our circle of friends is giving, but it’s something that we continue to brush up against. I’m aware that difference is why many of us arrive at these spaces…but I’m not trying to kii with horrible people. They end up coming to these spaces not because of difference, but because they are just gay. They don’t care about the music or what’s happening in these spaces. They’ll push you around, be disrespectful, and are likely working some evil gay guy job during the week…
The more and more I’m in this shit, the less I feel like being gay is even that othering. There are more pressing matters that we have to address.
YR: These notions of utopianism and intimacy you’re talking about are key to normalizing ties with cultural productions linked to Zionism. Queerness and techno have been used to normalize the occupation for years. Let’s be clear, parties and clubs are not actual spaces of revolutionary movement or insurgency. But they are great places to find each other—in difference—make plans and dream together towards something else in this world.
JHR: Exactly.
YR: This world—and here I’m referring to the inspiration for Zionist colonial expansion, its overdetermination, and straight-up violence—forces us to realize that our reality is super complex and requires a different understanding.
My time with Denise (Ferreira da Silva) was really important in broadening this critique for me. Particularly in this essay, you should read if you haven’t, “Blacklight,” but in all her work, she does this move of dismantling and examining value that I think is necessary to study. Like, why not assume that far beyond our physical conditions of existence, at the subatomic level, we are entangled with everything else in the universe? To the point where, and here I’m sort of borrowing her formulation, there is no distinction between everything, everyone, and us, between anything that has happened or what is happening. And that means no sequentiality, and therefore, functions of the state and its legal borders, all that becomes inconsequential.
This type of thinking, for me, in my practice and for my life, is a really encouraging way to problematize limits. I am not in Palestine, but I am constantly thinking about, challenged, and moved by Palestine, and my friends who are there, and my friends in Lebanon, and my family in Cuba, and people I’ll never meet who are suffering in ways I will never be able to understand.
It pisses me off when a promoter, etc., assumes this isn’t integral to how I work and move as an artist. It will never give ‘my existence is resistance’ for me. That’s a whole chop. We need to let that go. You showing up doesn’t mean anything until you show up because you understand and accept the serious and cosmic responsibility you have to other beings, animate and inanimate.
JHR: I’ve been meaning to get into ‘Blacklight’ when you first recommended it to me. I have it printed out at my studio. I appreciate how you’re able to cut through and get to the source of things so quickly. Even when you DJ, you figure out the blend or find the perfect cue faster than most people.
YR: Thank you, I’m honored you think that.
JHR: If not ‘a world within a weekend,’ what sort of language would you afford this?
YR: I think what we’re doing with our loved ones is an amazing intervention that precisely delineates this world’s harsh linearity by fitting all our worlds inside of each other’s, and the loop goes on and on and on and on. And it’s not for sale. It reminds me of some of my favorite words I’ve ever read that the Zapatistas said in their Fourth Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle: they don’t want a universe, they want a world in which many worlds can fit, ‘un mundo donde quepan muchos mundos.’
JHR: Stunning.
Do you remember the whiplash after a weekend of partying or DJing? Having to come back to class. You at NYU, me at Yale.
YR: So real. But during my last semester, I had Fred (Moten) at 9:30 am every Monday, some days I’d walk in, no sleep, maybe straight from playing something, he knew the tea. And despite the general horror of NYU, his class felt like this warped extension of the weekend. He has a DEEP bag. A lot of amazing soul and jazz, and other things. He’d play tracks and braid his lecture in and out of them, that’s how he teaches. He’s basically a DJ.
JHR: That sounds so rejuvenating after a carry. Fab. I did not have that.
YR: You had to go to Grand Central and run the long mission to get back.
JHR: My Monday morning was giving bitch, I didn’t get any sleep, and I still need to catch this two-hour train to New Haven. Then rush to make the studio visit I probably scheduled for like 10 am, present my ideas to the faculty, for them to respond with, “Where’s the club in this piece?” I’m just like, girl [JHR sighs], the work I was doing there was not about that at all. At Yale, no matter what I made, especially when it had nothing to do with partying, drugs, or nightlife, everyone was like, “I get what you mean. I partied in the 90s.” I was tired of hearing people say they feel “at home in the club.” I don’t feel like I’m at home at the club! I feel like I’m at the club. And if I feel like I’m at home, it’s probably because of my friends, but it has very little to do with the actual venue. There’s an impossibility in having these conversations in a studio visit or an academic setting because there’s an intellectualizing that needs to be done to make things legitimate, and I was trying to say these things don’t have to be legitimate to matter. It was more about technologies, embodiment, disembodiment, and how these influence a state of belonging, but never necessarily about making you feel belonging in the club.
YR: That’s frustrating because it’s indicative of an intense desire for art to reflect culture. Like, “I’m gay and I go to this gay bar or club, and I feel at home. So why isn’t your work speaking to my experience?”
JHR: Right. And this market that we’re coming into, that many of us are coming into, really prioritizes a specific type of work.
Someone asked me what I think makes a good DJ. I said, ‘They kind of have to be psychic.’
YR: They do.
JHR: They have to figure out what’s needed before it’s needed. Although it seems impossible, I think it comes
naturally to some of us. It’s kind of giving That’s So Raven, for skill, accuracy, and range, and then to also have the ability to be completely wrong and come back from that. This begs the question: what are the requirements for this?
I think it’s an acute awareness. Maybe people don’t know this, but you’re totally sober when you play.
YR: It works for me, you know? And I respond really well to the pressure that way. I love knowing that every time I DJ, something new will happen, a new sensibility will emerge, and I want to be fully present for it. I really love this level of obligation to craft.
I don’t get that nervous anymore, but if it comes up, I’ll sit with the anxiety for a while and turn it into excitement or something else that helps me zone in. I’ve battled imposter syndrome a lot, and it wasn’t until recently that I’ve been like…‘Ok, girl, you need to let that go.’ It’s still a thing for me, but I constantly remind myself I put a lot of time and love into what I do, and the people I care for and respect make sure that I don’t forget it.
I was in somatic therapy for a few years; it got me through really dark moments in my life where all I wanted to do was push every single feeling away, even the good ones. I eventually figured out I had to invite the discomfort in, but you have to find a way to work with it so it doesn’t have its way with you. I think music lets me do that. Fiercely. The need for invention and the need for destruction are deeply connected. I’ve played some really beautiful sets when I’ve been in pain. I feel ran-through after, though.
JHR: I’ve seen you do this.
YR: And then right after, it hits me… the choices I made in the last couple of hours had really specific effects on the bodies in the room with me. It’s a strange and surreal sense of control because it’s fragile, and it’s fleeting as soon as I’m aware of it.
When I’m DJing, I’m always leading with intuition for sure, but there’s also a part of me responding to history as well. So I heavily rely on my body as a technology. You know what I mean? It helps me scan and organize the references I want to make in a fab and sharp way—I hope that’s something people can feel when they’re dancing. Taipei, last summer, at Pawnshop. And again, last April at Zero Chill… those sets felt like… I don’t know… psychic engines going at full speed.
We’ve both been doing this for a little while. What does it feel like for you?
JHR: I had this conversation with Devoye, where he said it feels like becoming a mirror. And I think that’s interesting…it’s what I think I was getting at when I said you kind of have to be psychic. I always make this joke about what I call the ‘DJ gods’...sometimes, after a set, I’m like “the DJ God was not with me, girl. She was not!” when I feel like the synergy wasn’t there.
And you know, we have a certain spirituality at play that goes unsaid, that doesn’t necessarily require definitions.
YR: For sure. It’s a spirituality. It’s a deep respect and sacred curiosity for what’s about to happen and what may occur, and I’m completely humbled to be part of it.
JHR: Right. It’s just how we approach this practice. It’s the force we’re able to conjure between us. We’re coming from cultures that know ritual, and we know it is not a game.
This term is contested so much, though. Ritual pertains to a shared knowing between all participants, and when you go into a performance space where there’s one person who knows what the fuck is happening and you’re witnessing it, that’s not ritual, that’s a performance.
YR: I think a B2B could ride the line between performance and ritual. I’m talking to you in a secret language, and the dancers are committed to the uncertainty. Nobody knows what’s really going on except the two people up there creating it together.
