Nineteen different artists have banded together to release Always Here: A Compilation of Sounds from Iowa, a collection of songs, noise and poetry entirely by transgender and nonbinary Iowans. The record is exclusively available on Bandcamp, and all sales will be donated to the Iowa Trans Mutual Aid Fund. The proceeds from Always Here’s album release show, scheduled for July 27, will also benefit the fund.
Aaron Longoria of the Iowa City band Early Girl organized the compilation, which they hope will be the first of multiple releases featuring gender diverse local musicians. They were inspired to assemble the album after Iowa legislators passed a bill that removed protections for gender identity from the state’s civil rights law earlier this year.
“I was [at the protests at the Iowa State Capitol] the day that they had arrested a couple of people. ... I've been to protests before, but never at the Des Moines Capitol. I saw so many of my friends and musicians and artists and others, just like, community members that I know who had all made the drive,” Longoria said. “There was a point that day where there was someone who was like, ‘Hey, I was arrested at a protest like this,’ and they're like, ‘If you do not want to be arrested, you should leave.’"
“So I was like, ‘All right, I'm gonna dip, as a person of color.’ So I left, and it just really had me going home with this big weight over my head of, ‘What can I do?’ I felt like I had the skills to do something, to really help, and this kind of indirect way of helping to foster some art and creativity in a way that can raise money ... it just felt like something really accessible for me to do and was a way for me to get involved.”
The twenty tracks on Always Here feature a wide range of musical genres, as well as spoken word poetry. Longoria said that these pieces were chosen to encapsulate the multifaceted transgender experience.
It's solidarity, not charity.Storm O'Brink
“It's just like, a really eclectic mix,” Longoria said. “I want music by trans people about the trans experience, and that includes everything you know that can happen in a trans person's life.”
Myles Evangelista is a transmasculine singer-songwriter formerly based in Iowa City who performs as Mars Hojilla. Always Here opens with his track “Boo!!!!,” a folk punk song that challenges Iowa legislation restricting transgender people from using public bathrooms that align with their gender identity.
“I wrote this song to kind of play with the idea of transphobia and if it were an actual fear. It’s the idea of, ‘Why would you be scared of me and my siblings because we're trans when we could give you something actually real to be scared about?’ [It's about] the consequences of the evil legislation, the consequences that these laws are having on the people that they impact,” Evangelista explained.
Iowa City’s Trinity Hlynn Prater contributed two classical-inspired electronic pieces to the album, “Tenderly” and “verdad efimera en el final.” Prater noted that her work exists within a longstanding tradition of transgender women creating music with synthesizers.
“The pieces that I submitted were pieces of electronic music, mostly working with digital synthesizers that I wrote some years back, but they never got a proper release,” Prater said. “There's also a history of — particularly — transgender women working with synthesizers and making music with them, so I thought that this project would be a fitting home for those pieces. [“verdad efimera en el final”] really starts the exploration in my work of the fluid nature of identity and how context and perspective play more of a role in how something is perceived than just the nature of the thing itself. And that, I think, is a lot about my experience of transness.”
Both Evangelista and Prater will be performing at Always Here’s album release show at the James Theater in Iowa City Sunday, July 27. Multiple other artists who contributed to the record will also showcase their music and poetry at the event, which will feature vendors and information about community resources. Admission will be donation-based, with organizers suggesting a $10 contribution to the Iowa Trans Mutual Aid Fund.
Storm O’Brink is an Iowa City-based artist and Iowa Trans Mutual Aid Fund board member who contributed their poem “Spellbreaker” to the compilation. “Spellbreaker” celebrates platonic love and trans friendship while exploring what O’Brink called the “impermanence” of transgender people’s way of life in Iowa. They emphasized the importance of supporting the Iowa Trans Mutual Aid Fund in light of the recent reversal of legal protections for transgender and nonbinary people.
“Part of what the trans mutual aid fund does is we support our own community and try to provide the means to make it easier to live here. Recently, we're talking about increasing fundraising efforts to try and make sure that we have what it would take to support our community, especially as Medicaid is no longer covering that gender affirming care. So the trans mutual aid covers anything related to gender affirming care costs, everything from travel, if you have to go out of state, all the way up to paying for co-pays because we operate under a mutual aid-based model. It's solidarity, not charity.”
Always Here: A Compilation of Sounds from Iowa was an entirely grassroots operation, with artists submitting their own recordings to Longoria, who then had Des Moines musician and producer Keenan Crow master the record. Iowa native Kelso Messerschmitt designed the album cover.
“I've had friends describe it as kind of like an archive of trans art in Iowa at this moment,” Longoria said. “As a trans person, I'm constantly creating and making music, and so it just feels right.”
