Colin Self is a composer, musician and performer based between Berlin and New York. Their eclectic practice, entangled with queer community-building and consciousness, manifests again soon on their forthcoming album, r∞L4nGc (2025). At Rewire 2025, the artist will premiere the performance Gasp!, combining puppetry, music, video, and text. Gasp! is the second opera in their Shadow series, which tackles trans-dimensional dialogues, queer ancestry, and spiritual guidance.
In this conversation, the artist gives insights into their process and on how narratives re-affirm threads among the individual and the community, while highlighting the importance of acknowledging embodiment as a tangible and necessary complexity. From ethereal to bodily instances, their practice wanders in the fruitful brushlands between fantasy and reality – creating an urgent and vibrant kind of work unlike any other.
You’ve spoken about how you always understood and approached musicality through performance (i.e., imagining its final output as a performance with outfits, video, mise-en-scene). Can you speak about what goes into your process of recording? How do other parts of your practice leak into it?
Yes, there is so much to say in this regard. For me, the composition process is usually guided by principles of visualisation or conjuring. Sometimes a song or scene is very literally rooted in a dream I had, and other times, if I am working on composing and images begin to appear while listening to something, I let that instinct be a sort of compass to draw me forward into imagining a performance, ceremony, or action. I always consider my central mediums to be “relationships” and “time,” so often the music I create is in service of a circumstance that can make certain kinds of relationships with or shared experiences of time. The music, performances, costumes, puppets, or narratives are often there to affirm a process of transforming space-time between myself and others.
Watch "Colin Self - lemniscate [Official Video]" by "RVNG Intl." on https://www.youtube.com/
In your work, the ceremonial and the sensual seem to be woven together in a recurrent, meandering state. How does this approach – both ethereal but also deeply bodily and present – relate to your idea of the sacred?
So often, ceremonies are rooted in this modality of transcendence or feeling as though we are transported somewhere other than the world we are living in – but so much of why I make performance and music is to work towards embodiment and presence here on this side to show that this world, in all its profanity and complexity, is also sacred. On a fundamental level, it feels more important than ever to demonstrate how to be here on earth with the beautiful, the quotidian, the painful – that all of these secular parts of being human are also sacred. When people tell me something I sang was transcendent for them, I like to remind them that it happened here on earth. We are here.
You recently released the single respite for the tulpamancer. Could you elaborate on what tulpamancy is and how it plays a part in what you do? And following from that, what is the relationship between plurality and your sound?
I have felt hesitant to talk too much about tulpamancy out in public because it is a deeply complex and historically dynamic history that requires a lot of time to sit with, both in learning and in practice. In my own meditation practice, I felt narratively drawn to a dialogical practice with my own shadow self – feelings of doubt or fear or struggle – and began to see this relationship of negotiation to be deeply poetic and significant to the themes of this record. Communicating with my own spirit and sense of self propelled so much of this music into existence!
Can you speak to your relationships with fantasy and reality? How do they factor into your music?
Creating this record was very much a practice of affirming the “right to opacity,” a terminology I learned from Édouard Glissant, which fractures a clear delineation of fantasy or reality. When I think about my relationship to the spirit world, or the communion between myself and angels, helping spirits, or the practice of making and performing music, so much of it falls into opaque realms that are difficult to convey in language. In order to make this record I had to leave behind explanation or sense-making as a way to affirm illegibility, the shadow, the stranger, the strange.
What can our audience expect from your performance Gasp! at Rewire 2025?
A theatrical and raw, ridiculous and beautiful, emotional and joyous human experience. Puppets, costumes, choreography, gorgeous gowns, gestures of smallness and freakiness.
Colin Self perform the world premiere of Gasp! at Rewire 2025. Book tickets via: rewirefestival.nl/tickets