Photos Courtesy of Loone
Loone is an all trans and genderqueer post-folk, pastoral rock band from Greenfield, Massachusetts. There, they live in a house together called Lupinewood, which they utilize as a sanctuary and extend resources to trans people. Together, they are also putting the finishing touches on their album, A Bright Hollow, which will be released at an undetermined date this year. Last October I had the privilege of sitting down with Noel’le Longhaul, the front woman and main brain behind Loone, and Alyssa Kai, their “brilliant and chatty drummer,” to discuss these noteworthy projects.
Lupinewood is the beautiful old mansion in which the band resides. Together, the band members and other denizens are pooling their resources to use the space as “a permanent stronghold for trans sanctuary, radical art, and community organizing,” according to their website’s mission page. They host community events, for example, this fall they held a dance night to raise money for diapers. They are still in a stage of trying to get their feet off the ground as they work to raise money to actually “purchase the state granted rights to live on a piece of land,” Alyssa Kai explains.
The resources their land currently provides include a pollinator garden and “subsistence gardening,” according to Kai. They also hope to eventually offer midterm crisis housing for trans people who are temporarily displaced. To reach their goals and truly support the bodies of trans people while all living together, they must continue “loving the space and loving each other in it, and developing the actual infrastructure that’s necessary for our and its survival. From that it can begin to offer resources beyond the immediate spectrum of us and these first couple rings of intimacy with people that we have in our lives,” Longhaul believes. Love and tender interactions with one another are at the foundation of these projects and that was apparent throughout our lengthy discussion.
Loone, their band, is intended to be for Lupinewood, and there is no cloudiness around that. Noel’le so openly and eloquently shared, “Being in Lupinewood for me feels like a culmination of a series of things that I thought as a mentally ill trans woman I was never going to be able to have access to.” Both Kai and Longhaul spoke to the weight of processing trauma both on their own and then together with people. That process also reflects the way their music comes together at the seams. Loone is something that originated within Noel’le’s seclusion and was brought into form with an immense amount of support, understanding and love from her bandmates. Alyssa described the way in which Noel’le brings a song to the band, saying she feels like every song is a gift and that it’s their job to be very tender with that gift. In terms of the way they work the songs into what they are, Kai explains, “compositionally the four of us speak really different musical languages. But we have trained ourselves to find each others’ instincts and to do a lot of the wordless communication that makes music so powerful, for me, at least.”
Noel’le’s seedling thoughts and musical ideas are kneaded out into magnificent songs with the help of Alyssa Kai, Ruby Vespertilio and Nick Berger. They have proclaimed themselves as singing queer dirges, also tagging their music as post-folk, pastoral and devotional post-rock, on bandcamp. Their music moves people in tectonic ways during their live performances, or as Noel’le describes it, “they’re feeling like there was a space established where…they could actually engage with the sensations.” At the same time they are creating that space for people, Noel’le’s goal is to interrupt people’s distance from themselves. This is a risky move, she says, “in which people are placed in their bodies really intensely. It’s a dangerous thing to play at with people. But ultimately I think the choices we make around instrumentation attempt to do that. Like having moments of songs that stretch out into silence that are interrupted by incredibly loud and aggressive spaces.” Loone’s poetic lyrics and brilliant instrumentation work closely together to offer these moments.
They have another release under Paper bee in which the set up was different, with each band member playing multiple instruments. A Bright Hollow will be their first album release as Loone and has been in the making for six years. Longhaul worked alone for much of that time. “A lot of the songs that are on the record reach back into all of the work that I did manically alone in an attempt to gently and lovingly reshape some of the compulsive ideas that I was archiving.” This was all done as she was popping from one temporary shelter to the next. There was reconciliation and wisdom surrounding her as she went on to say, “for me A Bright Hollow is an attempt to actually start to wrap arms lovingly around a whole section of time and works that spans kind of a lot of distance.” She describes herself as having been dissociated and incapable of being present for her relationships and artwork back then. Noel’le writes all of the lyrics and honestly expressed, “For me so much of the narrative and the content that’s in A Bright Hollow is about my attempts to come into my body as a trans woman and an attempt to reckon with everything that that has meant over the course of many years.”
Longhaul was bold and clear that their music is not for everybody and she doesn’t want it to be. “There’s some presumptions about who we’re playing music for…I think that most people in this country would look at us and spit. And I would spit back. I know who I want to be there for in that sense. I don’t necessarily have a problem with alienating people who aren’t those people because I want it to be for them.” As far as their record release, Longhaul feels weariness in “marrying Loone to cultural capitalism.” She is also a visual artist and expressed that in general, attempting to “advocate for one’s artwork in the world can be uncomfortable — especially for me as an anarchist to do.” However, A Bright Hollow, is being mixed by Felix Walworth of Told Slant and mastered by Cam Boucher and will be released when the time feels right for the beautiful band, Loone.
Check out the video AP released of Loone performing at Studio 52 back in October: