my name is jessica, but i began life with a different name. i lived in ottawa from 1981-2013 and have been in windsor since 2013. i am many things; i am a composer, a producer, a guitarist, a bassist, a keyboard player, a sound design engineer, an author, a poet, a left field marketing strategist, a record label, a blogger, a vlogger, a director, a political analyst and activist, an anarchist/socialist, a socialite, a fashion model, a transgendered woman, an academic of sorts, an art and literature reviewer, a listener, a reader, a website designer, a social critic and satirist, a legal expert, a technology expert, a mathematician and polling analyst, a person reflecting on an often unusually difficult set of life experiences and sometimes even a serious thinker, to name a few things. i might even be a meme. i am not a journalist and i am not an "entrepreneur". in addition to my chosen name of jessica, i have utilized a sequence of screen or project names over the course of many years that have been deployed to create a series of projects of varying scopes and which intersect in various ways, the nature of which i will extrapolate upon in this space.
period 0
portrait of the artist as a young transwoman (1989-1996)
this is the journal i will eventually write of my experiences from 1989-1996, from a first-person perspective. to be clear, this is half biography and half creative writing. i will use the mechanism of a blog written by a child, and it will contain pictures of myself as a child, but i will be writing it by looking back, as an adult. this is not a collaborative project and will not include the perspectives of other people.
period 1
untitled project (1994-1995)
at the age of 12 or 13, i inspired my younger neighbour chris to learn how to play guitar, although it quickly became clear that he was interested in much angrier and much louder music than i was. a small number of collaborative attempts were aborted due to creative differences, as chris wanted to play aggressive metal and i didn't, i was more interested in the intersection of the grunge of the era with art rock or what was at the time called alternative rock. chris would go on to play in a number of rochester,ny-area and ottawa-area grindcore bands. i do not think there are any recordings with chris and don't remember writing any songs. while this was not any sort of serious project, i'm sure he'd remember jamming with me. 0 releases.
second class citizens (1995-1997)
stylized 2CC. at the beginning of high school, a friend of mine named matt wanted to start a punk band in which he would play bass and sing and i would play guitar. there was a song called atlas that was written in the style of nin's big man with a gun (although the actual influence was probably marilyn manson, which i remain largely unfamiliar with) that was influenced by ayn rand, and which i approached with kid gloves; while atlas did not develop, i did write two songs in a similar (but more music-theory informed) style, with the intent to have matt sing on them. specifically, big mosh pit song and unintelligible were supposed to be 2CC. in addition to these songs that were written for matt to sing on, i've got nothing to say is an inri song about matt. he flatly wasn't into it and it didn't develop. matt decided that i had more in common with his sister, which made the premise of being in a band with me unworkable. that is, i reminded him too much of his older sister, which is something he didn't like. matt was an odd duck that was uncomfortable in his sexuality. the truth is that matt was not very punk rock, but he found his right libertarian tribe in the fringes of the techno scene and had a moderately successful career as a happy hardcore dj in the 00s under the name darkstar. years later, in the mid 00s, matt was supposed to play bass in throatmotor, but i ended up doing it instead because he never actually learned how to play. the last i talked to matt, he lived somewhere in toronto. a low quality recording of atlas did exist (it was recorded on a handheld cassette recorder), but matt was last in possession of it c. 1996 and i would strongly doubt he still has it. i have no recordings of matt. frankly, i'd be open to it because matt always had a quirky set of idiosyncrasies that i thought i could develop if he'd let me, and i still think he'd be an interesting if deeply flawed front-person, but i would project no possibility of completing this project. 0 releases on inri records, but i have constructed a mock atlas promo ep as inriɣ with big mosh pit song, unintelligible and i've got nothing to say as b-sides and integrated it into the release list as a stub.
inri (1995-1999, 2013-2017, 2022)
inri was the screen and artist name that i used when i was a teenager, from my first demos when i was 15 until my 19th birthday in the first days of the year 2000. i conscientiously killed inri off when i turned 19 in order to leave it behind in my childhood. some attempts were made to salvage various components of the inri project from 2000-2013, but i largely left it for dead; i withdrew inri and inriched in 2004 and replaced them with a mix tape of guitar-oriented cut up parts called inricycled. when i first set up the bandcamp site in 2010, i only uploaded inridiculous and inricycled. when i sat down to complete my discography in 2013, i decided that i couldn't save the records but i changed my mind when i actually sat down to digitize the tapes at the end of 2014 and realized the records were salvageable after all. over 2015 and 2016, the end stages of the inri project (1997-1999) were then digitized from tape and remastered from source as instrumental recordings, which created a series of extended singles and compilation releases that documented the remastering process via different approaches. the music recorded for inri was intially experimental punk rock, but inri was the project that i cut my teeth with, and the project expanded into multipe disparate genres within the broader punk rock era. there are six inri records in my official lp sequence; inricycled, inri, inriched, inrimake, inridiculous & inrimoved. inri was a very solo project and i played almost everything mysel, with minimal input from other humans. there will be no further original inri material recorded. 42 releases: inri000-inri035, inri066, inri082-083, inri086-inri088.
period 2
deny everything (2000, 2004, 2006, 2014, 2017, 2022)
deny everything was the transitional project that existed between my childhood inri project and the more serious work i started in 2001. the singular deny everything lp is a concept record about george w. bush' 2000 election campaign that was remixed in 2004, in 2006 and a last time in 2014 to remove the last vocals and samples. the remaining lp is a purely instrumental work of experimental and psychedelic electronic music. a series of eps augment the now instrumental former concept record. there were no other contributors to deny everything. it is exceedingly unlikely that there will be further deny everything material. 8 releases: inri036-inri042, inri084a.
j's adventures in guitarland (2000-2001, ???)
this project documents a minimal sample of the flamboyant guitar performances that resulted through the process of deconstructing a series of student pieces that were presented to me by a classical guitar teacher that i took lessons from over '00 and '01; by that time, i'd been playing guitar for almost ten years and had already been through several years of training as a blues guitarist, albeit not for several years before then. i didn't want to go back to rock-era instruction, but i felt i could benefit from approaching the guitar from a different perspective. i also wanted to learn a little about counterpoint. so, we went with renaissance pieces to start off with and more avant pieces by the likes of leo brouwer near the end. a punk with a classical guitar is still a punk, just a punk with a classical guitar. throughout the experience, my cobain instincts and hendrix flairs overpowered any demands to play nicely. the truth is the guy i was paying absolutely despised me, but he also had a muted level of respect for somebody with the panache to think about even trying to pull this off. i caught him open-jawed a few times, as impressed as he was baffled. there were roughly twenty such student pieces that i mangled into my own creations; he'd present me with a score and i'd just do whatever i wanted with it, scrawling notes all over it, changing chords, making up notation symbols, just whatever i thought sounded better. the result was a legitimate fusion of noise rock and classical guitar music in a way that stressed technical playing over atmospheres. what is present here is a very small sample of what existed and does not accurately capture the depth of these performances. it was actually on the teacher's prodding that i began to record these pieces, but i didn't want to just record them as i played them, i wanted to recreate them as my own compositions. the version of little suite that exists is a good example of where i wanted to take the pieces in this project in the abstract, but i consistently found it exceedingly difficult to imagine ways to extrapolate upon these pieces in a way that would take them to the level i wanted to take them to and i consequently continually put the project aside until the stroke of inspiration that the pieces deserved hit me and i would know what to do. this epiphany never came, and the pieces are now lost; in 2014, i learned that i couldn't find the scores anywhere because they had been left in a shed over 2011-2013 and thrown in the trash when it was discovered they suffered from water damage. alas. there will be a second version of this; how far in the future that will be, i cannot say. i think a part of me wants to wait until i'm older and is happy i now have the excuse to do that. for now, the project remains on indefinite hiatus, at least until i can purchase a 23 fret electro-acoustic classical guitar that i can go overboard with in reinterpreting old pieces. 1 release: inri045 (as jjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjj).
jjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjj (2000-2003, 2014-2018, 2022-)
while all of my recordings utilize midi sequencing and make use of scored music, i placed a stronger emphasis on scored music over the years 2000-2003, which coincided with a period of time in which i took classical guitar lessons, and during these years wrote a number of pieces directly into a scorewriter on my pc, called noteworthy composer. these pieces were intended to be performed by live musicians, but they never were and instead sat on my hard drive until i sat down in 2014 with the explicit intention to complete them as electronic music compositions. between 2003 and 2014, consumer grade music production technology dramatically increased in quality, to the point that it was possible by about 2010 to produce full orchestral compositions via software synthesizers in a daw like cubase, if you could pay for the software. by 2014, i finally had access to both the hardware and the (warez) software that could turn a written electronic score into quality sounding orchestral music, which allowed me to finally convert the scores i wrote over 2000-2003 into listenable recordings. much of 2014-2018 was spent converting these existing scores written from 2000-2003 into electronic music and these works were subsequently released under the name jjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjj, in a sequence of lengthy ep singles and a series of conceptually defined compilation records. a small number of abstract rock songs written for inclusion in a rock project in 2002 that did not proceed past the demo stage at that time were also reclaimed as instrumental jjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjj tracks over 2014-2015. some minor session work contributions are maintained in the final recordings (a harmonica part, a recorded ring modulator knob twiddling session that i used as a raw noise source for further sound processing and a drum recording that i used as a sample source to build a drum part with; inri085 also adds vocals (for three tracks) that were recorded in 2002 as demoes to the final instrumental versions, as they were finished in 2014), but i am otherwise the sole writer and performer present in these recordings. the style of this project is experimental electronic classical music, which takes in a wide swath of influences (including industrial, noise, punk, psychedelia and many types of jazz), in it's path to being "serious". there is some possibility that i may reuse this project name for further scored compositions produced using software synthesizers over midi sequencing, so i do consider this to still be a live project. however, it is currently on hiatus for the foreseeable future. 16 releases: inri043-inri047, inri050, inri052, inri061, inri063, inri068-inri073, inri085, inri088.
other people's garbage (=======)
it was in mid 2001 or so that i realized i had a pile of garbage in my bedroom and was making music using some of it. i don't have all of those instruments any more, but i at the time had a substantive collection of half broken items purchased at garage sales for almost free that included electric guitars with funny electronics, acoustic guitars with warped necks, noisy electric air reed organs, malfunctioning effects pedals, etc. i decided that a conceptual release that explicitly uses broken gear purchased for almost nothing at garage sales would be an interesting idea, but it never actually produced any recordings. it is not clear if it ever will produce any recordings, but the intended style would be psychedelic noise in the neighbourhood of something like vampire belt or harry pussy. 0 releases.
the cynicide collaboration (2001, 2014)
i learned in later years that the cynicide collaboration (as it was presented to me) was actually an idea of maynard james keenan, the lead singer of tool, but i did not know that when it was presented to me by a guitarist friend of mine named jon, in 2000 or 2001. while i am primarily a guitarist as well, i can do lots of things and what jon needed for his project that he played guitar in was a bassist/keyboardist/producer, which i consented to take on the role of, for that project. he claimed he had a singer and a drummer; he did not actually have a drummer, and he didn't want to come to band practice so i started hanging out with the singer instead and that became rabit is wolf. i have recordings of enough of the songs that jon wanted to use for this project to build a long ep or short lp and could have completed them as glossy radio rock/pop songs (which is what they were intended to be) when i sat down to complete my discography in 2014 but decided to refrain from finishing them as they are simply not mine to finish. i'm also not sure if jon actually wrote them, as he had a history of passing off other people's ideas as his own (i don't want to call it plagiarism, because he abandoned these tracks; i'm more concerned that he was trying to impress me by using other people's ideas.). further, i'd characterize the demos i have as containing weak songwriting; while i could have just rewritten them to make them better, i kind of didn't want to, because they're not my songs. jon has a tendency to pout; the better i made his songs sound, the more he would have hated it. it wasn't worth it. i did, however, spend the summer of 2014 finishing a track that i explicitly wrote by myself for this project in the summer of 2001, by rebuilding it over the ry30 program from 2001 that i dumped to wav before i (regretfully) sold the device in 2003. mixes from the recordings done in 2014 (which include only myself), along with one demo from 2001 (which includes both jon and the singer, sean), are the contents of inri048. jon and i never really had much in common and there's no real chance that jon's songs will ever be recorded or produced by myself, but inri048 is a taste of what i would have wanted to do with them, as a producer/bassist, and what the project might have sounded like, if jon was actually serious about it. the style of this project was intended to be corporate rock music in the style of tool, korn, deftones or system of a down, as was popular in the early 00s, and which jon was far more into than i was; my track, which is what actually exists, is more influenced by commercial 90s art rock like the smashing pumpkins, the tea party and nine inch nails and also has a noticeable influence from early 00s post-rock like tortoise and do make say think. 1 release: inri048.
rabit is wolf (2001-2002, 2014-2015, 2023)
rabit is wolf was what actually resulted from the aborted cynicide collaboration project, which was a project that included myself and the singer from the above project, whose name was sean. i was also using a friend of everybody's named greg for drum samples and intended to convince him to play if it came to it, although he seemed to not want to; the project was officially myself as the composer and sean as the singer, but i had greg penciled in as the drummer as well, unbeknownst to him. jon didn't like the songs and didn't want to participate. i had known sean since junior high school, which was about 1993, but not well; we were in the same group of friends, but not really friends. sean was somewhat of a goth boi with a bit of a punk streak, so it wasn't a surprise that he wanted to do a joy division cover, which frustrated jon because he thought joy division sucked. i was also a joy division fan and thought it was a reasonable means of orientation. what actually came out of 2001-2002 was a series of incomplete demos, which are collected on inri057. i then spent 2014-2015 completing those demos as instrumental recordings, which is the bulk of what now exists under this pseudonym. the intended style of this project was never fully defined, except that it was supposed to be challenging. i hope you notice that while these tracks sound relatively normal, they are in fact absolutely fucking weird; you might notice the sudden shift into swing music in clarity, the extremely unusual sound design work in 9:46 or the bass solo/screamo duet in time as examples of how weird it is, to name a few examples. when it became clear that we were going to be a duo with duties split between music (myself) and vocals (sean), the comparison that i arrived at was skinny puppy, but sean was not a fan of skinny puppy at the time and didn't quite follow that. nonetheless, the first demos are relatively goth, by mutual consent. at some point, sean showed up with a neutral milk hotel cd and asked me to write songs in that style, and while i felt the record was lacking, i did try to rechannel my influences towards psychedelic and acoustic artists like rem and the smashing pumpkins that are substantive influences on me, which does come out in the middle demos. i was serious about performing as an acoustic duo over the summer, but sean randomly shifted directions a third time and now wanted to sing in a screamo band (like protest the hero), which is where he lost me as i wasn't remotely interested in screamo or remotely interested in playing in a screamo band or writing screamo songs. as a composer, it would have been helpful to me if sean would have shown up and said "i want to do this" and stuck to it, rather than shift from wanting to be new wave and goth, to wanting to be acoustic to wanting to be screamo, but jon picked him as a front person because he was fashionable, and his shifting tastes reflected the shift in culture occurring around 2002/2003, where rock culture was starting to implode. sean was changing with the times, and the times were unstable; he reflected that. i was really annoyed by the culture. personally, insofar as corporate rock music was concerned, i was more interested in the white stripes, but i wasn't much interested in corporate rock music at all. for the last demos, the influences are mostly psychedelic, as sean's participation was becoming increasingly tentative and i was retreating back to my solo post-rock projects. unlike the other projects attached to this record label, there is consequently no 'rabit is wolf sound' that the project is created as a medium to explore, there is rather a collection of failed attempts to define a sound with somebody that arrived in my studio on jon's false pretexts and couldn't figure out what he wanted to do. i am not aware of sean re-using this pseudonym, but there might be rabit is wolf recordings out there without my participation now or some day. as it is, i would consider my participation in future rabit is wolf collaborations to be extremely unlikely; if something were to exist in the future, it could be anything at all, including industrial hip hop or hypnagogic hardcore. i'd have to leave it up to sean to ask me to interpret the current fashions, which i'm too aloof to concern myself much with, and i'd interpret any request on a case by case basis. 9 releases: inri049, inri053-inri057, inri059, inri062, inri086. also collected as remastered and finalized instrumentals on inri063 and as remastered and finalized vocal mixes on inri085.
fuel true anarchy in the americas (2001-2004, 2014-2017, 2021-)
this is a political project that combines noise collages with samples of politicians, activists and other individuals speaking in public roles and was initially my reaction to the 9/11 attacks, which i immediately realized would be a substantive threat to civil rights in north america. the initial two track ep, inri051, contains a conceptual piece called 'strung out' that contains several string instruments playing improv over each other and is a reflection on our politicians selling us out or stringing us up to the police state after 9/11 to "keep us safe" and a noise piece i had already created that integrates a sample of a free trade protester that i had recorded from a cbc program, which was easy to do at the time because my video card had a cable tv input on it. this project then developed into a second act for 'deny everything', as i explored the collapse of liberal democracy and embrace of fascism that was occurring as a ramification of the bush presidency, via the excuse of "keeping us safe". these two records are combined together into an abridged single lp and integrated single comcept in inri067 under this pseudonym and then expanded back to a full 2xlp collection in inri084 under a split pseudonym of deny everything & fuel true anarchy in the americas. inri080 reflects on the war in afghanistan and musically extrapolates upon the transmigration of a soul separated from a body far too young. these singles culminate in an official lp at inri081, which was initially released as a collection of sample collages and which was re-released in 2021 as an instrumental recording, like inri041 was in 2014. the style of ftaa was intended to be harsh psychedelic noise with explicit political imagery, but it ended up as a less harsh and less intense (almost) instrumental electronic psychedelic record with a noise or industrial aesthetic. this idea will primarily carry on as cycles per second, but i do continue to have political opinions and it is entirely plausible that i may create more music in the initially intended style, albeit with an immediate alternate instrumental version available. 7 releases: inri051, inri058, inri060, inri067, inri080-inri081, inri084b
period 3
the trivial group (2002-2006, 2015-)
after i stopped using the inri pseudonym at the start of 2000, i intentionally shifted my attention to creating more serious compositions but the deny everything material still features songs with rock-era instrumentation and was my near singular musical focus until the end of 2000. shifting into 2001, i was primarily playing the classical guitar rather than the electric guitar and what i was writing was reflective of that fact. over 2001-2002, i had three main projects: a rock project where i didn't write the lyrics (with jon & sean, & greg), a noise project with activist subject matter (ftaa) and a serious music project that was instrumental and electronic and concerned with naturalistic and scientific imagery rather than politics or relationships (jjjjjjjjj). with the disintegration of rabit is wolf in mid-2002 and the reassertion of an introverted compositional process, this intellectual separation began to unravel and i found myself with a desire to reform my musical ideas into a single intellectual stream rather than a collection of increasingly orphaned concepts. i wanted all of these ideas to recombine into truly elaborate compositions that jumped around all over the place. the trivial group, which is a group theory joke, recombines the political, emotional, psychedelic, electronic, serious music, solo guitar & rock instrumentation components back into an integrated compositional whole with the intention of creating big, sweeping symphonic works that are initially organized into dense and lengthy eps and then collected into at least one epic record afterwards, while leaving the guitar compositions to the akousmatikoi project and the guitar-driven electronic music compositions to the tetris project (after 2004). the style of this project is electronic symphonic post-rock. there are currently incomplete compositions attached to this project and this project is currently active so there will certainly be further trivial group releases, as of late 2023. 12 releases: inri064-inri065, inri074, inri076-inri079, inri089-inri090, inri093-inri095..
akousmatikoi (2003-)
there are going to be a series of releases that consist strictly of songs played on electric or acoustic guitar. as of 2023, i am splitting these releases into a new project called akousmatikoi. i would expect further releases. 3 releases: inri075, impressionist jazz punk (inri098ish), genesis
throatmotor (2004-2005)
the same guitarist from the cynicide collaboration contacted me in mid-2004 about filling in as a temporary bassist in an electro-punk-pop band he had recently joined. jon moved closer to downtown ottawa with some work friends in 2003ish and realized there was a musician living across the street from him, whom he befriended. that musician was named trevor and trevor's electro-punk-pop project was named throatmotor. jon's role in the band was to play guitar parts that trevor wrote so that trevor could focus on singing, although i also think that trevor may have expected jon to play more of a lead guitar style and add things to the tracks, which he didn't. trevor's bass player left town in 2004, so jon called me. i was hesitant and skeptical about this as it wasn't a style i liked very much, but decided the songs had enough space for some prominent bass parts; in fact, what the songs needed was more prominent riffage, as well as some counterpoint in the bottom. you'll recall that i studied counterpoint as the bass component of the classical guitar, which is useful knowledge for anybody wanting to play bass. in addition to integrating riffage and counterpoint, i frequently utilized the bass as a sustained instrument in a way that is reminiscent of a contrabass or cello, so a characteristic of my bass playing was these long, sustained notes connected via glissando and manipulated via effects to sound as though they were bowed. trevor was a control freak and didn't like me playing all over his songs like this, even if he appreciated what i was doing, and he certainly did appreciate it; i recorded some bass parts into his computer, but i don't think trevor used them because he didn't feel like my busy playing was a good match for his simplistic pop-punk aesthetic, which is actually understandable, but, i mean, you asked me to play for you and i told you i'd be a busy player if i did. you got what i told you you'd get. i don't remember any of the parts, now. i initially consented to fill in as a temp bassist until they could find somebody else; by 2005, i had become frustrated that they were planning around me as a permanent replacement and somewhat aggressively suggested they find somebody else that actually liked their band and actually wanted to play in it. jon's girlfriend, mandy, ended up replacing me, and her parts were more what would be expected from a bassist in the genre, namely following the root notes. the style of the project was glossy, boring pop-punk, but there was a real attempt to make it more interesting by integrating different time signatures; further, the integration of a drum machine and a moog added for tonal variation, even if much of it was trite, which i tried to take to the next level with my bass parts, which are lost. we played pride in 2004 and 2005 (trevor is very gay and very proud of it) and did a handful of shows at the local clubs zaphod's and babylon. there is a demo cd but i am not on it. trevor moved to new brunswick many years ago and left throatmotor in ottawa when he did, which is reasonable; he grew out of it. it would be up to him to reform, but i wouldn't expect it. 0 releases, but if trevor still has my bass parts i would want to upload an ep of the tracks with them in it, here, for history's sake. there is also a demo i wrote for throatmotor in early 2005 that was not well received and that i will finish as a trivial group piece. the bass work on inri048 was also written to be purposefully reminiscent of the bass work i authored for throatmotor.
cycles per second (2004-)
cycles per second is a project designed to produce sound art out of pure mathematics, using matlab. the style is experimental sound collages. this will be a primary focus of the remaining period 3 labour.
π (2004-)
there are demos of rock songs written in 2004 and 2005 that are neither trivial group nor proverbs that i'm moving into the π project. these will be unconventional punk rock compositions.
period 4
proverbs (2006-)
proverbs takes the experimental post-rock of the trivial group, folds it back into a more palatable rock presentation and re-integrates political vocal themes. the trivial group has vocals, but they are about a relationship. proverbs breaks with that vocal theme and moves on to ftaa-style political imagery in the vocals, instead. this is currently in progress and there will be a series of releases released under this name, as the main project of period 4.
tetris (2007-2010, 2017-2018, ???)
tetris is my techno guitar project, which remains unrealized, as of 2023. a compilation was released in 2018 that combines tetris-like material from periods 1 and 2 because it will be a major component of period 4. the track 'evil is a human construction' is a better projection of what tetris will sound like. there will be further releases. 1 release: inri069 (as jjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjj).
deathtokoalas (2007-2014)
dsdfghghfsdflgkfgkja (2008-)
period 5
vlogs (2015-2020)
koala central command (2016-)