FOREST OF RADICAL UNSKILLED INTENTIONS
Anna Joy Springer (voice)
Rachel Carns and Tara Jane O'Neill (music)
"There is only one Anna Joy Springer. Only one. Her words take me
from kitten to monster and back again in a way only she can do."
– Kathleen Hanna, lead singer of Bikini Kill and Le Tigre
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"How to describe the charm, wit, innocence and energy in AJS's Red Relic? With intelligence and heart she enlarges a little the things a novel is capable How very lucky I am to have read it!"
– Carole Maso, author of AVA and Break Every Rule
"My god this book is beautiful. Each moment. A breath in a forest, a breathing beneath the bark of trees. A way to see that has remained shadowed, in shadows, under shadows, such sentence. each sentence a journey"
–Doug Rice, author of Blood of Mugwump: A Tiresian Tale of Incest and A Good Cuntboy Is Hard To Find
"A page-turner, fast and muscular, electric and sometimes “repulsive” (cf Rimbaud’s characterization of women’s writing-to-be as “delicate, repulsive, beautiful.”) Through the typography and collaging, you read a whole page incredibly swiftly, almost as if all at once. The handling of the Sumerian/Babylonian mythological material is superb. And you finally never know, as reader, if you are reading “myth” or autobiography.
– Alice Notley, author of Disobedience and Reason and Other Women
Anna Joy Springer is a prose writer and visual artist who makes grotesques – creating hybrid texts that combine sacred and profane elements to evoke intensely embodied conceptual-emotional experiences in readers. Formerly a singer in the Bay Area bands, Blatz, The Gr’ups, and Cypher in the Snow, Anna Joy has toured the United States and Europe being a wild feminist punk performer, and she has also toured with the all-women spoken word extravaganza, Sister Spit. She is author of the illustrated novella The Birdwisher (Birds of Lace) and a graphic narrative, In An Egg, forthcoming. She received her MFA in Literary Arts from Brown University in 2002, and she is an Assistant Professor of Literature at University of California, San Diego where she truly loves teaching courses in Experimental Writing, Graphic Texts, and Postmodern Feminist Literatures.
Rachel Carns is a queer[1] musician, composer, artist and performer currently living in Olympia, Washington, U.S.. Raised in small-town Wisconsin, she went on to study painting and drawing at Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York City, where she completed her B.F.A. in 1991. Carns is perhaps best known for her distinctive stand-up drumming style; she began as drummer for Kicking Giant, later collaborating with several influential bands, including The Need. She is a celebrated graphic designer, working under the name System Lux, and currently plays drums and percussion with experimental performance art group Cloud Eye Control.
Songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Tara Jane ONeil creates melodic and experimental music under her own name and in collaboration with other artists, musicians, and filmmakers. Her work innately crosses genres and boundaries—drawings that morph from natural forms to linear abstractions, melodic songcraft melded with experimental noise; live performances that range from solo songing to large ensemble improvisation; and dance, film and theater scores-each telling the story in a dialect all their own. Though they spring from the same source, each piece takes a distinct form—several genies emerging from a single lamp. Her musical life started at the tender age of 19 as the bass player for the influential and short lived art-punk ensemble Rodan in her hometown of Louisville, Kentucky. During the 1990’s, ONeil played in the duo Retsin, non-epic chamber rock band the Sonora Pine, and collaborated with many other groups. In New York City, she recorded her first solo album, Peregrine, in the bathtub of her Ludlow Street apartment; its 2000 release on Quarterstick Records marked the start of a series of increasingly complex and beautiful solo releases, most recently A Ways Away ( K records 2010). She has lived in the Pacific Northwest since 2003. While writing her own music, ONeil has also collaborated with Papa M, Mount Eerie, Ida, Mirah, Michael Hurley, Jackie-O Motherfucker, and the King Cobra, among others; she founded the Ecstatic Tambourine Orchestra. She has scored soundtracks for film and theater; and composed experimental performances for large ensembles. ONeil is also an accomplished visual artist whose paintings and drawings have exhibited worldwide, and appeared on several record covers and in numerous publications; two books of her artwork have been published, Who Takes A Feather (Map Press, Japan, 2003) and Wings. Strings. Meridians: A Blighted Bestiary (Yeti, 2007.) TJO’s collaboration with Japanese vocalist, Nikaido Kazumi will be released May 2011 on K records. She is currently working on a collection of instrumental work, and a new book of drawings for Publication Studios.
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