Today, Oxtail Recordings announces the May 31 release of Her Water Dream / Image Of A Blue Thumbs Up, the new double EP from Ariadne Randall, a bold artist whose works explore the tension inherent in being the queer child of “a traveling apocalyptic evangelist and a Gospel singer who roamed America’s Bible Belt.” 

Now based in Vienna, Austria, the multimedia artist, classically trained musician, and trans woman uses her work to engage with her experiences both before and after transition. Her Water Dream / Image Of A Blue Thumbs Up presents temporal landscapes composed of modular synthesizer, digitally transfigured textures, and Ariadne’s own voice, operatically emoting or delivering spoken word.

Accompanying the album announcement is lead single “[h2.1] her water dream,” a staggering and transformational piece that inspired a personal reckoning. As Ariadne shares: “I didn’t know I was trans, then improvised this song (…) and later knew what little girl runs through its forest path, and what flowers glisten in the crystal vase she holds. Invention, accident, foresight: who can say? I was without form and void, a voice over the water, looking for herself.”

The music on Her Water Dream / Image Of A Blue Thumbs Up is stunning — environments of resonance and mystery and boundless space that signal the arrival of an indelible new voice in ambient music. There are haunted atmospheres reminiscent of Grouper or the more subdued Burial tracks, humid and dense drones that evoke Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, and bubbling synthesizer figures that recall Emeralds.

Ariadne’s accompanying lyrics are compelling as well, marrying mystic modern poetry in the vein of Laurie Anderson with the mundane absurdity of Dry Cleaning’s Florence Shaw and Arab Strap’s ability to mine profound vulnerability from the more unseemly aspects of intimacy.

Says Ariadne: “much was difficult before coming out as trans, including releasing the solo records i was continually drafting: they were documents of a body which felt other, not my own. now, this veil lifted, i thread present and past towards an autobiography of affinities, a personal history in sound.”

She continues: “In two times of crisis – before coming out as a woman, and in the late days of a dark American presidency – I turned to improvisation as a funnel for the unknown. I looked for what I couldn’t imagine when the possibility of imagining differently seemed slim. This double EP came from this longing…In these songs I kept the rawness of invention because that rawness felt human: the craquelure of becoming anyone, perhaps.”