Today, the composer and performer Molly Joyce — who’s won acclaim for her uncompromising work that navigates the perceived limits of disability — shares the foreboding and minimal “August 13 + 16, 1999.” Featuring vocals from the experimental multi-instrumental and visual artist Fire-Toolz, the track finds Joyce revisiting the surreal sensations a life-altering surgical procedure. Atop a narcotized techno pulse, Joyce laces medical terminology with fraying industrial noise that comes to a head when Fire-Toolz screams break through the mix.

As Joyce shares: “These two operations represent the lower abdominal muscle transfer to left forearm for tissue coverage and skin graft from upper right thigh, and how in the second operation (August 16), they determined that the muscle was nonviable in the left forearm due to poor blood flow and therefore needed to discard it.

“The lyrics include lines such as “dissection in,  into me”, “abdominal closed, closed on me”, “skin graft / harvested from me”, and “concluded that / that the flap was / nonviable.” Lyrically and vocally, I was trying to get a more aggressive tone with the subject of a muscle taken one’s body, transferred, and ultimately not sustainable in that same body. I am not trying to get at this for a sense of pity or regret, but more just musically and artistically exploring how that can sound and viscerally feel.”

Listen to “August 13 + 16, 1999” here, premiered this morning on Magnet.

It’s the latest preview from Molly Joyce’s new album State Change, a deeply personal and visceral meditation on acquired disability and adaptive creativity. Produced with GRAMMY-winner William Brittelle (Justin Vernon, Oneohtrix Point Never, Wye Oak), State Change is due out July 11 via  Better Company Records in North America and FatCat Records’ 130701 imprint around the world. Pre-save State Change here.

Blending influences ranging from the 20th century modernist, minimalist lineage of Philip Glass or Steve Reich, to the spectral drones of Andy Stott, Missy Mazzoli, and Nico Muhly, State Change draws unflinchingly from the medical record of a childhood trauma for seven electro-acoustic tone poems — stark and oppressive in its medical aesthetic, yet ultimately cathartic and healing. Joyce crafted the album with GRAMMY-winning producer William Brittelle (Justin Vernon, Duran Duran, Dirty Projectors, Oneohtrix Point Never, Wye Oak).

Last month, Joyce shared “August 6, 1999,” the album opener which surveys, with clinical coldness, the damage from her initial accident.  “No function / No flexor / No extensor” and “In the wound / Paint and glass / Flesh and bone” is recited over glinting sine tones that evoke the sterile chill of a surgical theater. Joyce’s voice cuts through: “I lay down / Wound the left / Skin the flap of what remains.” Listen to “August 6, 1999” here.

“August 6, 1999” also introduces the MUGIC (Music/User Gesture Interface Control) device, which lets her shape clusters of sound without triggering stray pitches — something a traditional keyboard wouldn’t allow. Across the record, Joyce uses tools like motion capture systems, the touch-sensored KAiKU Music Glove, and Bela Trill touch sensors. With them, she renders rotation, pressure, and gesturing into live, generative sound. It’s in itself a path-paving use of technology in music and composition, but also a powerful commentary on disability.

State Change grew out of Joyce’s doctoral studies at the University of Virginia, where she began experimenting with adaptive music technology. “A professor mentioned the phrase state change in passing, and it immediately struck me — not just in a medical sense, but as a compositional idea.” As such, it became a guiding concept — undergirding not only the physiological shifts of acquired disability, but the creative explorations that followed.

Watch the video for “August 6, 1999” here.

Outside of her standalone work, Molly Joyce recently scored the original soundtrack for Patrice: The Movie, a documentary rom-com directed by Ted Passon, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival last year. She’s adept and translating her music to the performance space, as seen last year in her collaboration with Jerron Herman, which focused on embodying disability and in essence extricating one’s self from its perceived constraints. Read more about it here.